Arts and Popular Culture Fellow 2023-24

MAYTHA ALHASSEN: Hi, I'm Maytha Alhassen. I am a media and entertainment fellow for RPL. And my burning question is, how do you convert a witness into withness. And what I mean by that is when you witness an injustice, how are you part of the storytelling-- of testifying of the testimony to explain and bring to another world what you saw? And I'm also fascinated with what sight and insight looks like.  

But before I go into how that relates to media and entertainment, let me give you a little bit about what the seeding of that question was for me as Arab-Muslim girl growing up in Southern California. I was very typically into the world of art as a dancer, and I would watch the media that was around me.  

And my father was very interested in local politics. He would take us to city council meetings, political fundraisers, protests, canvassing, phone banking. And I would agree to go if I could wear the belly dancing outfit that my mom sewed for me.  

And when we went to these events-- I just want you to visualize this little girl with a coin belt around her waist being introduced by her father to these political officials as his future Congresswoman. And what that instilled in me as a young child, in a world where the only available image I had of somebody who looked like me was Princess Jasmine, was that even if the world-- the forces of dominant power-- didn't see myself or my story as a part of them, that my father's belief in me meant that was still possible.  

And so that motivated me to look for those stories that might not have been in the mainstream imagination, and to take that witness and do that storytelling work. So that's taken me to build with communities who are displaced in Greece, in Lebanon, in Turkey, at the US-Mexico border. It's brought me to the streets of Ferguson.  

And I did that work as a journalist for almost a decade and a half, and I was always so curious around what does it look like to make the stories that I heard on the ground visceral to people who are just watching it? And so the world of TV and film-- that narrative space that is so multisensory-- presents that opportunity. And let me take you a little bit into the theoretics for me of that practice.  

In Arabic, the word for witness is also testimony-- is to testify. And it also means an act of profession-- the Shahada. So for somebody who is a witness, it's a conjoint word with testimony. You can't do one without the other. But it's also our first act of faith-- is to declare our witness.  

Now interesting enough, this root word-- or this these root letters for this word-- shin ha dal-- also produces this word that means martyr. So how are witness, testimony, and martyr, and active profession all interconnected?  

Well the way that I theorize this, because every time the witness shows up in the Quran, in our Islamic exegesis, is in relation to stand up firmly for justice, and for justice against those who do transgressions to the oppressed. So the way I've conceptualized this is if you are a witness to injustice, a part of you dies. And you can only be reborn in the telling. And that's the work that I've been interested in doing in TV and film, and for building out that community of people who want to be storytellers that do the witness as well.  

So when we talk about representing ourselves or representing religious communities on TV and film, I think there's a step we have to go back, which is what does it mean to be witnesses to the stories in our community and to do that testifying work? And that's what I want to explore with all of you this next year and basically for the rest of my life.