Performing islam in europe: a case study of Poetic Pilgrimage's Performance of Empowerment inbetween art and religion Master thesis in the study of religion presented 30th May 2013 in the section of religion at the school of historical and contemporary studies södertörn university sweden Candidate: Elisabete Cátia Suzana Supervisor: Susanne Olsson Examiner: Göran Ståhle Opponent: Jonas Otterbeck contents introduction 4 • research question (5) • theoretical and analytical framework (5) • Empowerment and Performance, uses and theories (8) • thesis outline (11) • why is this research important? (13) method and material: decolonial approaches 15 • virtual friendships, close distances (18) • who are Poetic Pilgrimage (19) • sharing apart (20) • linguistic options (22) • selecting the material (23) • texts as Performance (25) • motherhood as condition of research (27) • where are the voices coming from or what is positionality (31) black european islam 35 • why 'black'? (35) • belonging as black (37) • black african diasporas, the black atlantic (39) • nothing essentially black (41) • is 'black muslim' an oxymoron? (42) • afrocentric islam as a strategy of Empowerment (44) • I. acknowledging racism (45) the transsaharian slave trade, afrocentrism and the elephant in the islamic room (48) • II. forging positive mirrors for enhanced self-esteem (50) a) positive mirrors as role models (52) b) positive mirrors as ideas: spiritual activism (56) -what type of activism? (60) -spiritual activism towards an inclusive notion of justice (63) c) positive mirrors as aesthetics: islam and rastafarianism and how material and intellectual are no dualities (64) -a ”Land Far Away” and afrocentric islamic aesthetics (66) -afrocentric islam: islam and rastafarianism mingle (69) -what is this ”Land Far Away”? (70) creative conflicts (71) 2 concluding remarks (75) modesty is the new cool: religion, Performance (arts) and gender 76 • which modesty (76) • 1. a modest leader (82) muslim women activism and the black woman's body (84) • 2. a modest artist (94) -women's bodies and voices: haram? (96) -hip hop and islam (98) 2.1. a modest voice: embodiment of modesty in the symbolic and physical voices in the song “Modern Day Marys” (102) 2.2. a modest body: embodiment of modesty in the bodily Performance of the song ”Unlikely Emcees” (110) • concluding remarks (115) concluding discussion 120 list of references 125 3 introduction We have no LOVE OF SELF! Coming to Islam hating ourselves will only make us overly love other cultures more. Islam does not equal Arab - Allah made us nations and tribes, he made you Black! you have to deal with that and learn your roots.1 Poetic Pilgrimage, facebook profile, 24th April 2011 I have always wondered why we should name an artist by her religious affiliation. Unless the artist is directly and outspokenly using artistic ways to express religious views, it makes no sense to name an artist "muslim"2 for instance. On the other hand, in the context of a dreamed multicultural europe and global fears towards islam, anyone with a muslim background will be labelled through her religious affiliation and views, i.e., a muslim artist is supposed to be a vehicle of expression of faith. European audiences and official stories are increasingly attentive to what an artist with a muslim background has to say regarding her fellow brothers and sisters in islam, as well as her individual practise of islam, the role of women in society, freedom of speech, secularism, the idea of an european islam, and other flashy topics. Any person with a muslim background has the worlds eyes on her. I believe this is based on the (mis)concept(ion) that a person with a muslim background has religion as fundamental of her life, culture, mentality, principles and behaviour. Furthermore, art and music in particular are used as tool for so often materialised revolutionary cries, independence wishes and (re)affirmations of identities. Putting a double spotlight on a muslim artist seems logical. So, am I also slipping into enlarging an already magnifying glass by writing about muslim women artists like Poetic Pilgrimage? Do I contribute to an excessive othering of Poetic Pilgrimage as black african diasporic muslim women artists in europe? 1 This is a follow up comment to Poetic Pigrimage's statement about how as black women, they cannot assert their blackness within islam, which I analyse in chapter "black european islam". 2 Refer to chapter “method and material: decolonial approaches” to understand my use of low and upper case, p.22-23. 4 research question This thesis is a case study seeking to explore the strategies of Empowerment in Poetic Pilgrimage's Performance as public artistic persona. The question that guides me is: how do they shape their Empowerment with their Performance? After becoming familiar with the material, I realised that one way of answering this question is by looking into how they relate to 1) an intersectional idea of Empowerment, namely how they relate to race and gender in their islamic art (religion/occupation/class) and 2) how Empowerment is directly connected with Performance, it is the Performance that enables their Empowerment: artistic Performance that shapes their ethnographic Performance of muslimness, womanhood, black womanhood, muslim womanhood, women artistry, britishness, etc. So in this text, it is their Performance of categories and themes that constitute strategies and processes or Empowerment. theoretical and analytical framework My focus of Empowerment is on representation, which makes me define Empowerment as the act of learning to Love yourself and others in positive ways. This is inspired in the work of Audre Lorde. And it is reflected in Poetic Pilgrimage's own stance, as revealed by the opening statement of this thesis, We have no LOVE OF SELF, they write. Empowerment, a process of learning to Love oneself and others positively is closely linked with creating an idea of self that is our own truth or like Audre Lorde puts it, defining ourselves for ourselves: [taken from a principle of an afrocentric celebration (Kwanzaa), celebrated on the second day of Kwanzaa] Kujichagulia -self-determination-the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others. Lorde 1984/2007:43 Central claim of my thesis emanates exactly from Audre Lorde's ideas that this type of Empowerment means that one acknowledges and embraces difference by 1) accepting one own's needs and issues, naming ourselves for ourselves and 2) having a dynamic intersectional idea of power structures where different categories in different 5 contexts work dynamically to allow and produce spaces of power and its absence. 3 She affirms recognition of difference as a step away from oppression. In her worldview that I share in general and here in particular, naming difference (of race, gender, age, class, sexuality, etc) is not the root of the oppressive nature of our socialisation. The problem according to her lies in the denial of difference and a tendency to blindness in recognising how our differences are misused to pit us against each other and so allowing us to (un)knowingly oppress each other with a high degree of legitimacy on the basis of who has the normative power in the situation. 4 Despite being almost 30 years old, Sister Outsider (1984), that collection of essays by Audre Lorde that has nurtured revolutions in feminist and black scholarship, Sister Outsider is timely actual. A slight essentialisation is something I notice in Audre Lorde's engagement with categories and difference. My focus on Performance means that I distance myself from constructs of identity markers that are not sensitive to construction and deconstruction. My underlying approach is to reflect on how Poetic Pilgrimage are and have been constructed by deconstructing them, question them. Taking into account that I cannot not think intersectionally, all themes under scrutiny here deal with ways in which Poetic Pilgrimage expose, explore and create islam and the arts of Performance to forge possibilities of Empowerment, in a way that I attempt to research all categories intersected. In the first thematic chapter (black european islam), emphasis is put on race and in the second thematic chapter (modesty is the new cool), focus turns to gender, though understood in relation to each other and to other categories, such as nationality, class, occupation, ethnicity. I flirt with a post-structuralist approach to religion and understand islam as beyond entity and identity, as a reality in construction and manifest in people's experiences and practises but also in their beliefs and ideologies. Analytically, I put emphasis on Performance. How they perform Empowerment, specifically how they perform themselves, how they perform those categories of muslim/black/woman/artist both discursively (statements on facebook, statements on interview, lyrics of the songs) and in Performance (on stage, in videoclips). Here, I contend that texts are performative, more so when I use abundantly of new social media that aim at and imitate 3 Lorde emphasizes the need to look in the face those traits of oppressor we have learnt and appropriated: What women here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? Lorde 1984/2007:132 and As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, […] the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships. Lorde 1984/2007:123 4 She argues that [c]ertainly there are very real differences between us of race, age and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation (Lorde 1984/2007:115).