Author: Sahand Sahebdivani

On May fifth, liberation day, we organized a storytelling evening in the Mezrab on the theme of freedom. The storytellers and musicians who participated all told us what freedom meant for them. We also asked our audiences about what freedom meant. This is what they told us:

….My feeling of liberation came for me when I did my first spinning class and realised I felt ok with my body. I fought Anorexia since I was 8 years old, went in and out of therapy, forced eating, all of the horrible things attached to the disease. But at the age of 26, I finally felt truly free from it. Safe to say I cried for the whole ride.

Liberation! The moment I first entered my freshly rented room in Amsterdam at the age of 18! It liberated me from all the conservative provincialism and above all my parents! In my thoughts I wrote ‘my palace!’ at the door!

I once went to Schiphol after an afterparty to the tui travel agency Bali to ask where we could fly at that moment in the middle of winter to go enjoy some sun. The woman told me no problem. There is a flight in 30 mins to Tenerife and the weather is lovely. 30 mins later we were on a plane and had the best sun of our lives.

As a Indian woman I was bound with some inculcated culture of restraining and restriction, not only in behaviour but thoughts as well which led me to be in a marriage, which was mentally physically and emotionally abusive. It felt a quick sand from where there is no way out, because of the fear of unknown on the other end of spectrum, making me feel highly underconfident. One day the husband came with a knife and I realised that nothing can be worse than this. At that moment I stepped out and entered an entirely unknown space of liberation and freedom. I slowly learnt what liberation word meant for me and it created a world for me, which I am extremely thankful for. This free world of mine, which I will safe guard with all my might.

always thought that once my mom accepts my queerness I will finally feel liberated… I came to The Netherlands and found the one person that made me wish I would not die soon, so that I can extend my happiness next to them. I had the opportunity to finally go back to my country and, after a decade of struggle, get my mom to accept who I am and who I love… and then I finally felt liberated, but I also found myself seeking for more liberation. Now, as a queer latin migrant, I am back at that place, waiting for that one thing to happen to be liberated… AGAIN: my belonging. I then came to realise that liberation is not that one thing we get in our journey called life… but this constant continuum that never ends. Liberation just makes us crave… seek… wish… another type of freedom…. And that… Is ok…

On my first date with my now fiancé I accidentally farted on her. 🤷‍♂️

The morning I woke up in Amsterdam after a long ride from Jordan, I walked outside without a feminine Hijab in the street, I saw my reflection on a building and it was the first time I recognized myself in a public space

The freedom to walk around naked in your apartment without caring what the neighbors think.

Is there liberation in going back to your own country?
I left it almost 12 years ago and what I needed to free myself from is very different from what it is now.
It’s funny how almost everything I despised about my own roots are now the very same things I look for when I travel. And I do that a lot as part of my job. Whenever I go somewhere new I look for those roots, though they are wearing different clothes and speaking different languages than the ones I learned to despise. It took me many years of wandering and as many of therapy to figure out that the rejection I felt in and towards my own island, was a rejection of myself. And I was looking for myself in all those new places, new voices, smells, and flavours.
I don’t know if I will find myself again back home, but I know what I need to free myself from. And that is shame. Shame of being proud of my roots. Shame of speaking my own language. Shame of wearing my traditional clothes and dance my traditional dances.

My story of liberation:

I am Arabic, raised Muslim but ironically, bisexual. My first experience with a woman was a day before my exams.
I met her on lesbian tinder: Her. We texted and met at a bar near my house, chit chatted and then I had my tongue in her mouth. After a long walk at a park, I took her down to my apartment. And then… she enjoyed it, I didn’t so much. I wanted it to end so bad, but she slept over. Next morning, I had to get ready for my exam, she asks me to get breakfast but I only offer a cup of tea (I know, shame on my Syrian self).
As I run around and try to make her the tea, I open a cabinet and an iron you iron clothes with fell with the point down onto my toe.
Long story short, I get rushed to the hospital with my lesbian hookup only to meet my mother there worried mother.
How do you even explain this situation to a Muslim mother?
I fabricated a lie,
At the end I failed my exam
Failed my mother but at least I got a cool scar on my big toe!

For me freedom showed itself in micro moments of happiness. Mostly when sitting on my bike, having the wind brushing my hair back, cold on my face – Sometimes warm. Like today, this sudden spring rain – It was beautiful. I know, people don’t particularly like the rain, I kind of always embraced it.
Anyways…
Last autumn I moved to this beautiful city out of complete randomness. I didn’t know anyone, didn’t have a job here (that one is back in Vienna still). But Austria felt like a cage, a corset that was tightening up with every month that passed. When I decided to move away, it was just an away – Amsterdam happened along the way. I knew, I was suddenly free when I arrived on a sunny day in October. Entering my first ever home (alone). Everything kind of fell into place. I know, many people here complain about the weather, but for me the sun has been shining since then. And I appreciate every tiny bit of it. Because it’s freedom, and freedom is live. And I wanted to share a moment of it with you. Thanks :))

My loving, amazing, traditional, religious mother passed away from covid in 2021 and until then, I’d felt pressure to find a man and have a child… as the years ticked by. When she died; along with extreme, ongoing sadness – came freedom and liberation from having to live in her idea of what a woman’s role is and who a woman should be with. I now live as a happy, single, queer, childfree woman enjoying all that life has to offer!

And often wonder what she’d make of it all…while missing her terribly!

I am russian and I have felt free only when I was protesting against government, political repressions and unfair elections. I have always had love-hate relationships with my country and spent my whole adult life in this desperate protest. Most of our co-citizens were against us oppositioners and even hated us so only when protesting I felt myself among people who share the country, pain and responsibility with me. Now after Russia invaded Ukraine I don’t feel free at all. I had to leave Russia because people who tell the truth go to jail there. And I feel even more hated by my co-citizens. But everywhere else I also feel like I don’t have a right to say anything at all because I’m from the country which started this terrible war and I am told over and over again that I am responsible for it. Like the woman from Turkey I don’t have any conclusion. And I also don’t have any hope that some day I will be able to love my country without pain and guilt.

I didn’t know what a Kobza looked like. It sounded like a harp sometimes, at other times like a guitar. It’s music haunting, soulful, melancholy… A friend had copied me a CD, and on the cover had only written Julian Kytasty – Black Sea Winds.

I listened to it a few hundred times? When I finally looked up the instrument and the tradition. To find out it is a magical instrument of a Ukrainian musical tradition of a few hundred years. The Kobzari traditionally being bands of mostly blind musicians (if you had a blind kid, they would be useless around the house, so letting them join the music bands allowed them to make a living). Another strand in the rich tapestry of Ukrainian culture, which was wiped out mostly in the thirties in the Soviet times. What the famine didn’t destroy was consciously eradicated, specifically by targeting artists such as the Kobzari, to try to destroy traces of a separate Ukrainian culture.

Kytasty’s was born in the US to a family of Ukranian refugees. He revived a tradition that was almost dead. Molding memories into music we can listen to today. Dive in, click through the track, put on some tea and listen when the news of the war becomes too much.

And if you see the convoys of refugees, remind yourself what they’re leaving behind, and what they will be forced to recreate.

Yesterday was the last day when the curfew in the Netherlands still had its power. Our friend Theo Langason wrote a poem inspired by the pictures of empty past-curfew streets from a few weeks ago (taken by Alborz Sahebdivani).

Have a read:

I have been told much this year
of loss and its long arms
felt it too
reaching across oceans
winding through streets
around corners
knocking on our doors and windows

even the smallest apartment has an echo
when it is empty

I think of bodies water
rivers in reverse
wells run dry

the earth is
mostly water and
so are we

each of us
a lonely planet
bathed in darkness
eyes fixed on distant stars
long-dead stars

I think of our bodies
full up with grief and
pain and grief and
somehow still finding room
for joy and laughter and
hope and
all that water

mostly water

each of us
a body of water
rivers in reverse
wells run dry
winding through streets
around corners
knocking on our doors and windows

hoping one day
this grief this dark
this empty will end

we’ve grown tired of
echos and ripples and
the proof of distance

hoping one day to
return to the source
puddles to the ocean
bodies to other bodies
soon

Hi Mezrabians!

Some time ago two of our friends decided to collaborate: Alborz Sahebdivani ventured into the nature with his camera, and Margo van de Linde wrote poems inspired by his pictures. The end result is precious, and we want to share it with you, take a look:

——

These days dew drips off me while real rain rides into my veins.

I guess it was about time I experienced the integral.

Jagged edges don’t seem rough now, they are just the definition that’s needed for me to place myself within this frame as i see fit.

Soft as cotton she appears.

A careful arm extended, still spinning herself out.

Who would dare pass me by, pick me, preserve me in some container of glass?

I was made only for the admiration that sits on the whisp of air in your step as you pass me by.

So, 2020 turned out to be another name for Pandora’s box. So much came out of it that was painful, or just weird. From the almost war between the US and Iran, raging fires in Australia, murder hornets, the rise of far right, and obviously the pandemic. But you’re not going to read anything new on the Mezrab blog about all that which you didn’t know before.

Instead we’re just going to put here only some of the cool things we did do in 2020. Because honestly, that’s what the Mezrab is all about. It was formed out of a need to do what we missed in life. And boy, when that need was present this year we stepped up and did a whole bunch of stuff. So here’s in no particular order:

In 2020 we collaborated with a few different organisations. Some for the first time, some as a continuation of previous collaborations. First off, there was the Oerol festival which, like many other festivals, had to cancel doing live shows with audiences. Instead they turned the island into a laboratory for collaborations and experimentation. One of which was a project in which a live film and a story were performed, while the audience was able to vote on how the story progresses. Here’s Anastasis of Mezrab meeting with the One Seconds interactive film lab at Oerol: watch it here!

Another collaboration we did was with the Bostheater. This Amsterdam icon is a theater that in non-Corona times packs 1500 people to watch great outdoor theater spectacle. We were asked to come and do small storytelling shows there, as the place couldn’t afford to bring a huge audience. The result was a few amazing shows, some of which benefitted from the outdoor ambience, and some of which drowned in the rain (though the audience showed exceptional bravery and stayed till the end). For the Dutchies, you can read what the Theaterkrant had to say about it here.

Speaking about the Theaterkrant, they were also very happy to review the shows Mezrab made with Vis-a-Vis. A project called Almere 187  brought together regular people of the city of Almere who had never told a story before. In two evenings we worked on the stories to whip them in shape and bring them to the stage, alongside the stories of experienced tellers. Here’s what the Theaterkrant wrote (again, in Dutch).

But even if you can’t read Dutch here’s a few pictures of the event, taken by Anna van Kooij that can give you an idea of what it felt like to tell and listen at this intimate event:

That’s it for today, but we’ll be back soon with more news about Mezrab stuff!

So, happy new year everyone! Actually, I googled etiquette sites to find if it’s still ok to wish someone a happy new year on the 8th of January. The jury seems to be out, but in case you are offended by it, remind yourself that many Orthodox Christians only celebrated Christmas yesterday. So what’s time anyway?

At Mezrab we celebrated the new year with an amazing party in which staff and friends became the ancient Greek gods of olden times. Not a day too soon it seemed. Immediately after we revelled in Bacchanalian excess the year brought us apocalyptic fires in Australia and the Iranian and American drums of war in Iraq. Now here’s something interesting we observed (apart from the many political, historical and social angles that people more knowledgeable than us will talk about at length), in this conflict there was a HUGE need to create a narrative for people to follow.

In Iran the clear story that was created was this: The slain general Suleimani was a war hero who single handedly rid the world of the ISIS threat. The death of whom should be avenged. We have never seen so many government supporters in the streets of Iran since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini as the amount that came to mourn the beloved general. The people deserved revenge for the slaying of their hero.

For America the narrative was the direct opposite. Suleimani was responsible for arming and training Shi’a militias, adding to the instability and violence of the region. A terrorist leader who’s death was warranted. Any retaliation would be seen as a continuation of terroristic violence which would be answered by swift retribution. So, here we had two narratives that were mutually exclusive, and each would require a violent act towards the other to bring its narrative to a dramatically satisfying end. From the outside it’s easy to see how the narratives could lock each other in a spiral of violence.

But here’s where mastery in storytelling saved the day. Iran retaliated with a barrage of missiles on American targets in Iraq. Before it attacked it warned the Iraqis, who told the Americans. The early warning meant that damage was minimal, possibly resulting in zero deaths. In Iranian media they talked about 80 dead Americans. Iran’s story ended with a resulting victory. If you kill our general you will pay times eighty. Any report of zero deaths obviously is western propaganda. America had a satisfying ending to their narrative as well: Iran was too weak to do any actual damage. They huffed and they puffed and amounted to nothing. Both have the ending they desired.

Of course we hope that with this episode the stories are actually finished. Anyone who watches Netflix knows some writers can’t resist the temptation to add episodes and seasons where they are not needed. As storytelling teachers we are advising the writers of these war tales that dragging on this narrative will lead to bad reviews and a serious loss of life.

A week ago we got an interesting mail. It was written by a Mezrab fan with political view points that we assume are a minority in the Mezrab (not that we ask people about their politics when we let them in). We’re very happy to have received this letter, as we believe it can spark an interesting debate. For sure we are happy that the fan didn’t take his frustrations home, but took the effort to share them with us. So before we write anything back, what do you think? Any opinions? Mail them to us so we can keep the conversation going.

(The mail was translated by us from Dutch)

Hi Mezrab people!

Yesterday I was in the audience of the storytelling night. It was so much fun! I’m anyway a great fan of your events. There’s only one thing that bothers me.

It’s the way in which people with a right-wing political opinion are made fun of and ridiculed. Here’s one of many examples that a host used: “applaud as if Trump has just been impeached”, but of course there were more.

My question is: How can you preach inclusivity if so easily you can make fun of people with a conservative political view? I personally love Trump and vote PVV/FvD in the Netherlands. Can you imagine how you would feel being in an audience yourself and constantly being ridiculed for your views? How does that gel with your policy of inclusiveness and diversity? Don’t you think that scares off people with a different political opinion? And how does that help going against the phenomenon of people living in bubbles?

I bet your motivation and reasoning is: “But Trump/conservatives/pvv are the ones who are hateful/racists” and you’re entitled to that opinion! But that’s only your judgement, not that of the vast majority voting for those parties/opinions.

I would love to have a really neutral, open and diverse storytelling night in which everyone is welcome. You too, right?

“I’ve found the most Mezrab possible place for you” says my friend Raffi.  And indeed, the little corner cafe with its performance basement has all the elements that make my heart race. On the wall there’s a lovingly drawn icon of the city of Beirut, a sexy picture of Che Guevara (which you can appreciate in earnest or ironically), toilet walls covered in intense underground comics, and most importantly, a programming schedule that includes feminist talks and drag shows for which double the amount of people show up that could comfortably sit in the place. There’s European women sitting at tables with Arabic men to learn the language (why not the other way around? Do Arabic women not teach? Do European men not want to learn Arabic?) and French, English and even German is routinely answered by the staff. The Lebanese are as linguistically versatile as the Dutch it seems. One of the perks of having the little country syndrome.

The manager, Hussain, tells me that the ones who don’t get it think this is a hipster place. It’s bullshit of course. Being Hipster means buying overpriced food uptown. This is a place that is consciously anti-fascist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic. Set up by owners who all do other things in addition to owning the place: Being a painter/sculptor, a carpenter, a DJ…

Apparently it is also one of the many little battlefronts in keeping Beirut for the Beirutis. If you worry about gentrification in Amsterdam (and you should) then Beirut will break your heart. Whole neighbourhoods are left to delipidate, after which the blocks are torn down and replaced by luxury high rises. But that’s a worry for the outside. Inside, an open mic starts that moves you with how similar is the need to express in different countries.Spoken word pieces are read directly from the screen of a phone. Stand-up comedy is tried in both Arabic and English, two young men even try a rap battle (with no music but with one of them choking), and all range from pretty bad to quite ok. It’s in this setting that I do a bit of storytelling. A personal story of revolution. It has elements of comedy and poetry in it, enough to make a connection with what’s happening, but still very much its own thing. When that’s done there’s one feeling that remains. Can we do this? Can we share our stories without pouring them into the mold of comedy or spoken word? When the host tells them I’ve been invited to do a full storytelling show on Saturday I’m sure more than a few will show up. What’s more exciting for me is what happens after. When I return, will one or two have decided to tell their stories as… you know, a story?

So, I did a thing. In this week’s mail I send out I included the following paragraph:

What an exciting time to live in! There’s elections happening left and right, and more right. Like the one in which the Netherland’s latest enfant terrible Thierry Baudet made a speech about the flapping of the wings of the pigeon of Minerva. Logically we’re concerned about his politics, but we are an inclusive place and always get excited when a politician references mythology. So we decided to invite him to the storytelling open mic later this month. And he accepted!!! We will not give him any preferential treatment though, he gets 8 minutes like everyone else. No matter how big the mythological zoo he decides to bring in his story.

If calling it the pigeon instead of the owl of Minerva didn’t clue you in, then the date the message was sent might have: April 1st. So no, we didn’t invite right wing populist Thierry Baudet to perform in the Mez. The mail did create an avalanche of messages though. Some had guessed it was a prank, others thought we had really invited him. A minority of those who thought we invited him and mailed us thought it was a daring move. Either to diversify the voices that we have on stage, or to show him a thing or two about what storytelling is about. Most people however wanted us to reconsider, and not give a platform to a xenophobe and climate denier. (Though the mails we received were nothing compared to the avalanche of mails congratulating us with a successful prank the day after we confessed).

Beyond the prank there is of course an interesting debate to be had about who to invite to tell stories on our stage. We didn’t invite Thierry, but would we?

A while ago a friend came to a storytelling night and and hearing a particularly irksome performer posted this on Facebook:

May god(s)/the universe save us from the most privileged people who still shamelessly believe them proudly sharing stories of their privileged position within the society can somehow “save” the world.

The message sparked quite a little debate on her wall and in private messages between us. While we had both been annoyed by the performer we decided that we didn’t want them not to perform, if only for keeping the Mezrab from becoming an echo chamber of voices we agree with, shielding us both from different view points as well as the audiences that might want to hear them. The last thing this society needs is more fragmentation, sitting in our respective camps while shaking a fist into the air. We also agreed that we could stomach these voices if there had been put enough effort in finding enough other voices, of people from various backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations.

There is a big difference though, between inviting people from privileged backgrounds who might be a bit clueless and inviting active supporters of a xenophobic party. Here I personally would still choose to invite the teller. Or at least not say that we can’t. Not for them to propagate an ideology we don’t support, but because I am interested in the stories that make up even this life. How were their parents? What did they dream of growing up? How did heartbreak feel for them? Sure, we might feel uncomfortable hearing some of it, but storytelling isn’t just about feeling comfort.

Finally, would we invite Thierry to tell himself? To that the answer would be a categorical no. When the person has become the party, humanising the person is humanising the party. There is enough media that do that job, every time they go to his house and have him play a bit of piano. We would however enjoy seeing him in the audience, to hear the beautiful multitude of voices that we have on stage.