Post 3

An artist that truly inspired me was Amal Kassir: Story-telling activist and Spoken word poet. Amal was born and raised in Denver, Colorado to a German-Iowan Mother and Syrian Father. Two seemingly opposing worlds combined to grant Amal her lived experience. She spent years on her grandmother’s farm in Syria and enjoyed the sweetness of fresh parsley and ripe lemons. Her grandmother taught them the secret recipes that stay highlighted on their restaurant’s dinner menu.  

This was long before any war or conflict arose in Syria. Amal enjoyed the company of her cousins, aunts, and uncles through each visit. Thirty-one of whom were tragically killed due to airstrikes, chemical attacks, explosions, and sheer chaos. The landscape which she knew all too well, flattened by the piling rubble of broken buildings. Trapped underneath were cousins that Amal spent the summers with. She watched from a distance, on screens, and video messages – as the number of casualties and murders grew bigger.

At home, in Denver, Amal designed her own undergraduate degree called ‘Community Programming in Social Psychology’. She argues that nothing can change without the solidarity of community; An idea that led her into the open-ended territory of social justice activism. A world where public opinion has the power to change public policy. Nationwide, Amal organizes vigils, demonstrations, and fundraisers for victims, refugees, and under-served populations. She uses her voice to speak up for those who had been silenced due to language barriers or lack of representation.

Her fiery spoken word poetry and story-telling activism is the result of her lived experience. Her sadness and frustration seeps through every single word. The urgency to act now boldly echoes in her voice. But she never walks away without giving you a sense of her name. Her name, Amal, which means “Hope” in Arabic. The hope that we will live to see a better world : one that doesn’t hate people seeking asylum, discriminate over race, religion or gender – or look the other way when seeing police brutality in the streets.  As citizens of the globally connected world, we need to be armed with information more than ever. It’s at our fingertips.

Amal is a major proponent in education and building individual agency in particularly under-served and vulnerable populations. She hopes to take part in the global effort for literacy in war-struck areas and refugee camps through writing. She is an international spoken word poet, having performed in 10 countries and over 100 cities. She has conducted workshops, given lectures, and recited her poetry in venues ranging from youth prisons, to orphanages to refugee camps to universities to churches to community spaces for the public.

Amal’s work connects to my own project because we are both trying to make people more informed about certain topics and issues through poetry and spoken word. We both connect experiences from our own lives and use poetry to tell our stories. We both would like to see a better world with less hate, and through Dispeling My Single Story, I’m trying to educate people in hopes to creating a more loving and informed world.

Works Cited

“Amal Kassir.” Book A Muslim, https://bookamuslim.com/amal-kassir/.