August 2021 is the month I got to take part in “das letzte spektakel” by the rhizomatic circus collective through a heartily loved one. It was the one-way entrance to a place that has changed me and my life path.
This community brought about by distantly different artists has a concept somewhat close to a utopia: everyone is mad, everyone is welcomed and everyone is family. It is the entire opposite of everything I’ve ever known, I was left processing this experience for a good amount of time. The further I processed the closer I got to the true Light, the bigger and better decisions I made the more my future looked never the same. Those people mightn’t realize how they reawakened my artistry, the songs they have inspired are countless and, being from a different background than all of them, the fight I chose to have by pursuing art is a risk I didn’t even rethink, it was ultimately my biggest work of art.
In current days the younger generation is going through new things, individualism is becoming celebrated speedily and sequentially for the first time in history. All the young people are victims of fast-growing, we are all such different individuals indulged in who we are, and that makes it nearly unmanageable to find a place to call your own. However, I call this collective my own regardless of how small of a role I’ve played in it or how many shows I wasn’t part of, I’ve been met with anything but rejection. Going through the memories we made together I usually end up utterly confused just for the simple fact that I handled with so much acceptance, the acceptance that we don’t find in most places in our days, especially being one from a variety of unwelcomed groups of society.
The Rhizom is a functional household, I’m growing in it healthily. I do things now and then I can’t explain, my creation and artistry are livened, I can’t stop making things, my own house has become an exhibition, I stopped thinking about what’s coming because they trust what I bring to the table and they trust I can overcome my foreign struggles and all the inequality I live with everyday. Sometimes I forget those “exotic” struggles when I’m with them and I’m very thankful for those given opportunities to breathe.
Life is perceived differently by us, people of colour, and it is not an everyday thing that we find a place where we’re housed without the need to spread education. As a good friend would say: you handled it well. The thing is, it’s they who have handled it well, they make me feel like just another person, it’s not what we’re used to but somehow they managed it so easily.
The connection we all have is beyond just a so-called art project, some of them I barely know but when I exchange eyes with them it feels so personal and my feelings well up. This is my motivation to do more and this is what made our show very successful, we depend on each other.
I have a lot to tell my young folks about how much these moments will live in my mind and how much I love my rhizomatic people, it is a part of my identity now.
I’m a cute little queer Arab refugee and I’ll always be a rhizom person because I’m not marginalized there. I will stay right there.