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BSG: I would love to hear about your take on political\/creative work. How, for you, do political and creative work overlap? And what brings you to poetry? Who inspires you creatively\/politically?<\/i><\/p>\n
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MS: <\/b>I think creativity and politics overlap in that we have to look at who can afford to be creative vs. who is forced to be creative, as far as resistance and how we use our voices. Sometimes I feel that both my native tongue Farsi and English fail to express how I\u2019m feeling. Some pain just comes out sideways. So I write poetry as an informal, honest way I can let things out. It feels like a kind of relief I can\u2019t get anywhere else, except maybe from singing. But singing is more removed as I don\u2019t often write my own music \u2013 I\u2019m singing other people\u2019s stories and trying to make them my own. When I read poetry, I am reading by my own hand. And as far as creative\/political inspirations…Malcolm X, Jennicet Guti\u00e9rrez, CeCe McDonald, Warsan Shire, and Nina Simone.<\/p>\n
BSG: I sometimes hear people dismissing, or pitting \u201cidentity politics\u201d against the so-called \u201creal\u201d struggles of social transformation\/revolution. How do you relate to this kind of framing of social struggles?<\/i><\/p>\n
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MS:<\/b> I think I\u2019ve heard this before, but it often comes in the same vein that erasure and colorblindness do. \u201cIdentity politics\u201d is a term I\u2019ve only heard in a negative light; as if having an identity at all is somehow inherently wrong. I don\u2019t agree. I do think there is useful work to be done around organizing and uniting together against oppression, but attacking each other for having identities is not something I think is productive to that goal.<\/p>\n
BSG: I recently saw and loved your quote, \u201ci aspire to infiltrate white space and disrupt it everywhere i go.\u201d Can you talk some more about that? For instance, what does that look like in practice?<\/i><\/p>\n
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MS: <\/b>There isn\u2019t a real way this looks in practice aside from me just existing as a pale person of color. By that I mean when I feel safe, and sometimes even when I don\u2019t, I will disrupt oppression where I see it. Often that looks different in different situations, but by and large, white people, especially white cis men, think they get a pass with me. They think they can say something around me they wouldn\u2019t say in front of someone who they read as black or a woman. And when I call them out, it often takes them by surprise. I\u2019m still working on this though, I think I could be better about sticking my neck out more often.<\/p>\n
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BSG: In some of my first engagements with feminist communities, in the mid-late 90s, there were struggles between exclusionary feminists who wanted women-only spaces (we didn\u2019t use the term cis then), and the trans and intersex communities. A lot of the GLB community also excluded trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex people. The clashes are still going on, but I\u2019ve felt some changes in terms of the better centering of trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex people within feminist and other activist struggles. What is your take on this?<\/i><\/p>\n
MS:<\/b> I think there is still a great deal of exclusion. Of course I cannot speak to it directly as I am not a trans woman or trans femme, but I know they get excluded the most. I see it experienced by people close to me. Maybe it has gotten better, I\u2019m not sure of that either. But there are plenty of folks who want to strip us all of our humanity, and unfortunately, trans women get it pretty badly. My friend Sam Escobar, who identifies as genderqueer, recently asked me some questions for a piece on women-only spaces being more trans inclusive (see femsplain.com\/on-being-non-binary-in-female-spaces-12d5980e7f0c#.2jbnsi2n7).<\/p>\n
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BSG: What were some of the things that excited\/nourished you at the recent LGBT Muslim Retreat?<\/i><\/p>\n
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MS:<\/b> Oh man! There was so much. We did a lot of beautiful, moving workshops together, prayed together, ate together, and in general just cried, healed, and had fun together. I think what excited me the most was that I could be in a space with people I just met and feel so at home and such love for them. It rejuvenated my connection to Islam and how really beautiful that can be as a queer and trans person. And it was nourishing in the same way \u2013 that so much love, healing, and validation could happen for all the parts of myself that didn\u2019t have a community before.<\/p>\n
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BSG: How has your political consciousness grown? What inspires you?<\/i><\/p>\n
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MS:<\/b> Throughout my life, I have made a lot of mistakes. I have held beliefs that were not ok and tried very hard to assimilate. I even thought I was white for a long time, because Iranians are often told they are white, and many tell themselves that as well. I think I knew in my heart things weren\u2019t lining up when I was calling myself a white woman. I\u2019m much happier now as a brown butch. I get a lot of inspiration from other QPOC, or queer people of color. Our collective strength and resilience inspires me to move forward.<\/p>\n
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BSG: Do you think about the work of personal\/political healing\/trauma?<\/i><\/p>\n
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MS:<\/b> I think depoliticization of the personal is not possible. Healing and trauma are very connected to politics for me. We don\u2019t always quantify racial trauma, or our experiences outside of the typical narrative of trauma. Not to diminish the trauma of war, but there are more ways to be hurt and traumatized than just that.<\/p>\n
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BSG: Where do you take strength and nourishment from?<\/i><\/p>\n
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MS:<\/b> I get strength and nourishment from other qtpoc [queer and trans people of color], particularly women. I just find women to be stronger than me, and when I find strength in myself it comes from validation in my selves* as a person radically existing in a society that wants me dead.<\/p>\n
BSG: This is so sad to have to reference this, but would you want to say something in response to the murders at Pulse in Orlando?<\/i><\/p>\n
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MS:<\/b> It is a sad, sad time. I think we are all feeling sad. It was a terrible thing that happened, but I think it is important that we, as a global community, remember who the victims were, and address this as a systemic problem with our capitalist culture.<\/p>\n
Our culture produces these violent, homophobic, transphobic, misogynist\/transmisogynist, and racist actions. There is a lot of media attention on the shooter, but we need to remember the victims. This attack was on Latin night at the club, and it left behind many Latinx and black people dead. Many were undocumented. Many were trans. What we need from mainstream culture as far as solidarity is true solidarity; stop the ICE raids on Latinx queer\/trans and nonqueer\/cis folks. Stop coming to honor black and brown people only when they are dead. Stop condemning an entire community of Muslim folks for the actions of a shooter which were not related to his faith. Stop calling this a terrorist attack; it was a hate crime. I am seeing a lot of media coverage of Muslim LGBT+ folk right now, and it is such an unfortunate circumstance that we are being highlighted over the bodies of our slain fellow QTPOC. <\/i><\/p>\n
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Glossary:<\/span> The Peace Newsletter is pleased to share this collaborative interview between Maysam Seraji, a 24-year-old Syracuse University student who identifies as an Iranian-American, transmasculine Muslim and Becca Shaw Glaser, a 38-year-old Jewish activist-gardener-artist-writer-teacher. They met while organizing an anti-Trump demonstration in Syracuse in early 2016. We\u2019ve included a glossary to…<\/p>\n
Cis AKA Cisgender:<\/b> An individual who has a match between the gender they were assigned at birth and the roles and behaviors considered by society to be appropriate to their particular sex.
Colorblindness:<\/b> The ideology that erases people\u2019s experiences based on race and\/or ethnicity.
Erasure:<\/b> The removal of something (in this context, of one\u2019s experience).
Genderqueer:<\/b> A term used by some individuals who identify as neither entirely male nor entirely female.
Gender non-conforming:<\/b> Individuals whose gender expression is different from societal expectations related to gender.
Heteropatriarchy:<\/b> Society as fundamentally based on male dominance\u2014a dominance inherently built on a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm.
Intersex:<\/b> People who are born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy and\/or chromosome pattern that does not seem to fit typical definitions of male or female. Intersex conditions are also known as differences of sex development (DSD).
Latinx:<\/b> A gender inclusive term which replaces gendered terms such as Latino\/a\/@.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"