 This weekend's Reorient Forum and Festival has been in the works for months. We began early conversations with our program partners at the end of last year, early this year. I want to just take a moment to acknowledge those program partners. Many of them are here in the room. Theater Without Borders, Theater Bay Area, Theater Communications Group, Free Dimensional, Hybrid Theater Works, University of San Francisco, ZSpace, our host, and our Middle East America partners, LARC Play Development and Self-World Rising. So thank you so much for being a part of creating this weekend's program. The Reorient Festival, as many of you know, was created to showcase the diversity of the Middle East and its worldwide diaspora. Similarly, the Forum provides a space for conversations that build on that diaspora to redefine identities and reshape culture. Looking at what is going on between Israel and Palestine today, I'm reminded of the painful limits of politics and the bankrupt imagination of politicians. I'm inspired by the movements for self-determination and civil rights in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, but I worry about their chances of success. What room is there for peaceful transformation where guns are held against us? What role do artists play in shaping and reflecting society? I look forward to learning from you the answers to these questions, this impressive group of speakers that we've gathered here this weekend. This conversation will help steer our imagination as we continue to navigate these precarious moments. Imagination was our guide as the unparalleled Reorient team meticulously devised and implemented the plans for the Reorient Festival at Forum, I'm going to take a moment and introduce them. Lara Benson, who put up a fabulous breakfast spread out there. Jesse Brownstein in charge of our live streaming and production manager. Lane Foreman, who will be with us shortly. Naveed and Lane will be with us shortly because they will share your ride. Michelle Mulhellen is at the front desk, our operations manager. Evan Archkin, literary, artistic associate of Golden Thread, and marketing guru. Danielle, our marketing associate, somewhere back there. Heather, who will join me on stage please just so that you can see her. Heather is the forum coordinator and she will emcee the program this weekend. Any questions you have, personal life, Mercury, Retrograde, whatever, direct them to Heather, she'll be able to answer you. Thanks, Heather. Let's see if I miss anybody. So now it's my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker. He is one of the most unique thinkers of our time. He is as inspiring as controversial, a teacher, writer, unmatched scholar. Hamid Taboshi has challenged us with his ideas and analysis for many years. My first introduction to Hamid's work was with his book, Theater of Diaspora, a collection of plays by Hamid Sayyad. Next I read his article on Tazyeh where he analyzed the use of Tazyeh's symbology in the national referendum that resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran. Anyone who tells you theater has no impact on politics needs to read that article. So thank you so much for being here, Hamid Taboshi. Thank you everyone. I had my note of gratitude for you to come and brave this fantastic weather you have in your beautiful town. First and foremost, my absolute gratitude to your friend and colleague Toland for including me in this conversation. And thank you to Heather for braving your traffic and picking me up from the airport and all the other acts of demand for coming here. I'm absolutely honored to be part of this distinguished number of panelists. We'll be able to talk today. I look forward to hearing them. I was privileged to watch a number of fantastic plays last night in the next space right next to me here. And my eldest daughter, Patty, is a theater actor. I just text her. She's in Boston. The police exquisite directed actors with a number of plays both in terms of formal aspects of performance and dramaturgy and the political relevance to our contemporary time. Now, as for my talk, Heather said that she would tell me when to stop. The thing is, after you have white light, nobody can stop you. We have an expression in Persian that some people are reticent to dance so keep asking them for dance when they sing. And then when they stop singing and dancing, they can't stop them. So we say you have to give them a dollar to start singing then you have to give them three dollars to stop singing and dancing. So I have something to share, something to read for you. It's a formal honour and respect by host. It's a formal reflection. And reflection is the two concepts in what Toranj gave me of identity and authority or central to what I'm going to read. And I'm going to think it through the question of access and in order, what does it mean to have an accent? What is the notion of an accent? And in order to put it right on the spot, let me give you... I've been thinking about writing about accents for quite some time but when Toranj asked me to talk about the issue of in our own words and the question of identity and authority I was reminded recently a couple of months ago I was in Tucson, Arizona. To give a talk. And I was put in this fantastic inn in which you have communal breakfast. I'm sure you have communal breakfast with other members of the war in this inn. And at the breakfast we're just slightly having sort of pep talks and conversations and there are a number of other guests in this inn. And at some point a very nice lady asked me and where do you come from? I said, Mama, come from New York. And she said, I need to take a little bit of accent. And I said, yes ma'am, so do I. So the key question is about the business of accent is how is it that people don't hear their own accent? And then immediately they recognized that you had an accent. So if you bear with me, it's not too long. I don't think Heather has to call the police. It's not too long. But I invite you to think with me along with this question of identity and authority and business of politics. So here it is. In our own words. What words I wonder? You mean in Persian, English, Arabic, German or what? In the electronic flyer announcing my talk here at Reorient 2012 Festival in Porno, we have a citation that reads, quote, at a time when the Middle East dominates the headlines and Reorient aspires to forge clarity by chaos. This time the festival incites us to look past the 24-7 media blitz to see the cycles of tragedy. San Jose American news. Tragedy? Why tragedy? Who said, oh we have in this ghastly colonial chimeric we have concocted and we keep regurgitating as the Middle East. All we have are no less than cycles of tragedy. How about comedy? Drama, epic, lyricism, gibberish, frivolity, nonsense. All of them together, none of them in particular. Why and by what authority? Cycles of tragedy, so no. Cycles of tragedy are not our own words. San Jose American news protests too much. Yes, we have had our share of tragedy, but also much more. And in the general title I have been given to talk about here at the Reorient 2012 Festival in Porno, we read the current state of the arts. Identity, alterity, and representation in the current climate of change and upheaval. Now, these are my words. Our words. Words I did not write but can easily claim and call my own even the nervous repetition of the word current twice in short sentences. So which words are our own and which are not? The good words. Words that sustain our fragile humanity. As Ima says in Murlamin, the aim and saying bird. Looted in people's pain be eloquent. Let it be, amen. And whatever thought teaches us passivity may it go to ruins. Amen, amen. And may it go to ruins under the defiant cries of the wretched of the earth. Every critical thought that the tired masses have defied. So no, cycles of tragedy are not our own words. It is a critical thought that the tired but defiant masses defy. The words, as you see, that are not our own can be in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Swedish, Hausa, German, Spanish, Malayalam, at infinite. And the question they ask in this time of massive labour including intellectual labour. Migration is what exactly is our own words, our own language. What language is it that we can call our own? Bilingualism, living happily in two or more houses, two or more homes, two or more worlds, is the condition of living self transformative. And fusing oneself interchangeably from one into the other, thus confusing their boundaries, living comfortably upon that wide and wide margin that separates one artificially manufactured identity from another. We, the socially marginalised, they in fact fancy ourselves culturally amphibious. And thus politically liberated. From all atrocities perpetrated on both sides of every border. Worlds thus placed against each other self-substitute and Dutch grafted, Dutch being grafted into one claustrophobic nationalism or another. We become transnationalists, dodging the banality while are taking the emancipatory disposition of both. The public space with us form and the public art with us stage and the public intellectual we hereby anticipate belongs to no notion state in particular and yet no notion state in particular can evade the caring intellect that forms and informs our very nosy, nosy, meandering into forcibly nationalised boundaries. We, if so factual, if up. We, the many. The happy many. In between any two worlds that claim us and embracing and overcoming them both, our autobiography becomes if so factual, heterographical. We are the heterographers of our own autobiography. By writing our own stories we are writing the unwritten, the unread and disallowed lives of all our others who have historically sustained their own identity by writing us out of their own histories. Your ghost writers haven't come back to Amsterdam. The difference between English and Persian or German and Arabic, etc. between what I now say in English and I might just might read it. Also, also be able to say in Persian becomes tantamount to a dirigent difference. Different by virtue of a constant differ. That by always already differing one language to another the gesture implicates an ever-changing other. This mantles the metaphysics of presence embedded with any particular language and within it any notion of origin or finality. Then it does take on Freud's trace, as an inscription of difference, in this case becomes the accent we speak or write in a language not our own and yet made paradoxically our own precisely by the virtue of that accent. This paradoxical claim of accent becomes the political unconscious of the accented language. In this Imenation in 172, Merida demonstrated how the unconscious in fact lacks any inherent hidden or virtual self-presence. That it is in fact the sight of an alterity a past that was never present nor will it ever be. This for us means the increasing evidence of an accent that we have in fact invented for the language that used to be our host. And is now our guest. That there is no insight about the past that was never present is exactly the opposite of William Faulkner's famous and flawed statement in Requiem for a Nun, 1950, that the past is never dead. It's not even past. Recently miscluded by Woody Allen in his midnight in Paris 2012 and resulted in an lawsuit filed by the Faulkner online editor. In the scene when the time-traveling protagonist of Wilson says the past is not dead. Actually it is not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. I met him too. I ran into him at a dinner party. It's actually a clear indication that the past is constantly reinvented. In this case, Woody Allen reinvented something that Faulkner had not in fact said. And yet, that fallacious attribution made proper sense when and where Allen used it in his film. Where William Faulkner is no longer the famous author of Absalom, Absalom and Other, looks but a mere trope, a citation. Look to such acts of creation and performance in all these accented languages due to the moment of mynesses or even more important to the necessary instinct of the effect of making the strange of the breath in alienation, of making strange. There he does a proposition that languages that are facto haunted by its own innate propensity towards dispersal and loss becomes far more evident in between any two languages than inside any particular language. For that is precisely where a philosophy becomes literature in another language and vice versa. That dismantled mynesses, where seriousness becomes frivolity and frivolity gets serious, where jokes cannot be translated and that the physics of morals become orientalist jokes, is precisely the location where the hidden or repressed and doing of sense on the borderline of nonsense begins to make perfect sense. Here in the heart of the other language, which we have made our own, we do not just make the foreign familiar, we also make the familiar foreign, as in the case of making that very nice woman aware that she speaks with an accent. And you can only imagine how unnerving that can be, both to our mother and to our children's palms. We are the bridge of the strangers, threatening the fabricated authenticity of cultures, exposing the fabricated authenticity and insolence as we infiltrate into cultures and by making them strangers to themselves we make ourselves familiar to them and thus we make them while confirming them in delusion that they are a melting pot. We are the return of the cultural repress that it was fabricated by conceiving its own negations, dispersions, dissemination. In theorizing cultural hybridity, Baba in effect did exactly the opposite of what he thought was doing. He cross authenticated the two sides in fact to zoom hybridity and posited in liminal space where there is none. For Baba, boundary is the location of the emerging culture whereas the consistent chasings of labour and capital after each other has made the mockery of the borders and boundaries. Baba's conception of liminality is thus a self alienating proposition that is predicated on the phobia of power or swim or both precisely in the moment when he cross essentializes and cross authenticate both sides of the prison of liminality attributing to them to the metaphysics of authenticity and certainty that they in fact lack but always successfully fake. Baba authenticated that fake plate authenticity by providing a space in between for it. We bilinguals are not liminal, we are amphibians. We possess languages not despite our accent but because of them. As we master a new alien dominant language we don't just possess them we hunt and we make them possessed by us. We are not many strangers to our own world for having lived in other worlds we live in two or more worlds and by just living them we have made them familiar to ourselves and strangers to themselves and in that strangeness these worlds we discover themselves thanks to strangers that they seek to make of us we dismantle the metaphysics of authenticity their self totalizing proclivities their metaphysics of presence where we are there are always already depressed absences we intruders are Canadians and by the time our children with the Persian or Arab or Indian or Turkish name to start speaking German, English, French or Italian the paradox of that fieflendul has dismantled the binary metaphysics that makes all false claims to authenticity possible. We, by coastal creatures of two or more seas dismantle the self totalizing proclivities of old cultures we are not a culture of hybrids hybridity was a false idea theorized from an anxiety of dual identity we are not dual we expose duality and in a tertiary move we move forward and discover new continents we healthy and wholesome by or multilingual creatures are prophets of ruins and fragmentations of dismantling fascistic monolinguals to think they are the center of the universe we is centered the universe we the center of the knowing subject we iterate on parallel and diagonal lives that intersect and diverse we the artists and prefix of the forum in the familiar are a threat to homonormativity we confuse the color line by our heteronormativity we are always the other mimicking the other and through that mimicry they cannot tell us themselves from the other we are the invention of our others as we mimic ourselves on those ways of the self-totalizing myth we are the allegories of our own austerities of the world of the world's influence yet to come we are the nightmares of Rostam-e-Farouqzad and thriving on it in the famous letter of Rostam-e-Farouqzad when Rostam-e-Farouqzad bemoans the mixing of races that is about to happen in Iran and in the Arabian region the Iran and the Turk and the Qazi the end of the Middle East neither the Turk nor the Qazi the coldness of the Middle East from Iranians and Turks and Arabs a new raceful image there is neither Iranian nor Turk nor Arab what he bemoans we must celebrate but the miracle of discovery is this last part of this letter Suhanha the Kerdare Bawzi the way that Rostam-e-Farouqzad means it is words will lack meaning but the actual original words words become playful Bawzi a fantastic word in Persian Suhanha works the Kerdare so the act as if Bawzi at this stage what people do is Bawzi the act words become playful we beautiful Mongols are the inheritors of the earth and we sing beautiful songs Ahle Prashanah this is Suhanha Nassadam-e-Farouqzad the one who is in the middle of the black Nassadam-e-Farouqzad Nassadam-e-Farouqzad and the one who is in the middle of the black I am from Khashan my ancestry reaches all the way back with plenty meaning or a relic from the black mountains my ancestry perhaps reaches the prostitute in Bukhara I just want to make sure that the email I sent somehow reached you we had this you have to speak louder louder you want me to speak louder? yes I can hear myself in the United States we have this thing called political or a identity politics and I would propose that that is a reduction of what you are talking about and if you elevate the the different identities from different cultures problem of course in the United States is two things one is this is the empire the other one is there is an infinite level of reduction of any of these ideas so that all you have to do is twist it just a bit and it becomes kind of foolish so how does somebody who is advocating some kind of elevation of the mind to deal with this problem? the question if you didn't hear it back there is that if I understood you correctly please correct me if I did not what I said might be interpreted as reduced to politics of identity my position is precisely the opposite of politics of identity exactly our proposal of identity is going to Hawaii I'm going to New York exactly the opposite and by the issue of in fact believing and relying on the factual evidence of sociality and by that I don't have any frictitious notion of sociality right here beginning at 9 o'clock until this moment we have created a sociality by which you are my saying something you are responding and beginning to communicate this creates a shared memory and that shared memory begins to perform identity beyond I have no idea where is your background or how is that background relevant to what you just said nor has it mattered that that becomes a reduction what is important is the factual evidence of the collective space of the public reason as a manual concept we generate that public reason right now as we speak this reality has for me far more is far more palpable than somebody saying what Hanid just said has to be from Salvador she I remember my eldest daughter had this once somebody was asking her how do you say we in Persian you say e e so it is not a verbal expression it is an emotional expression and then she is more verbal she is more verbal as a result of far more fluent than her elder brother you can't legislate the whole point of the argument is you have to be true to who you are whatever language that comes naturally to you let the chess fall and the chess usually fall in the most surprising, fantastic and beautiful places and I don't believe I live in New York I mean the first language is Spanish occasionally people also speak Spanish and to me this is glorious this is how it is the written history of migrations labour migrations that have happened in these societies so my from my own experiences is that first of all kids are different they have different modes of register and what they do and how central's language is to their life next question first I maybe got a question which is that I got cramps from liking me scolding you on paper as you were speaking which is in line with your moment but I would hope that there is a way that we can access your words online or something that we really appreciate and unpack your presentation I'll give it to you I wanted to ask your thoughts about the notion of global citizenship and you know it was something that I am myself an immigrant living here for over 25 years already but a practice of work I've seen many parts of the world and I always thought about that as an opportunity to take in different ways of doing things and being and incorporating them into my own and opening up my own sense of self I was listening to Bandana Shiva speaking about how we move forward from the situation where we live in and she was an adamant advocate of a global citizenship consciousness and I wonder what your thoughts were about that and if that is possible beyond so moving beyond the idea of actually traveling from one place to another and I don't know if I'm making this that's where my question is beginning with the notion of global citizenship I think that false falsification false identification the morning after September 11 I'm walking towards my office and here a friend colleague I've known her for decades on Columbia campus very progressive politically etc comes to me and says but I mean why did they did this I said you know I didn't come to ask I think they did the morning after why do you think just because his name was Muhammad and my name is Hanid I have an envelope in the mind of the mass murder is a false identity by virtue of one name or another or a sense of for example guilt that if Osama Allah is doing something you think then I have to feel ashamed because I'm Muslim or any other false identity but the opposite of that is not a vacuous global citizenship the opposite of that I believe is what Zimmer called web of group affiliation that we generate around ourselves the notion of self that you said self is not abstract self Zimmer said the self that becomes manifested in society is the result of the number of web of group affiliations with which you identify whatever those web of group affiliations are now through social networking an additional circle is made possible by virtue of in this web of group affiliation and I have things far more in common with people in remote parts of the world but nothing in common with my own neighborhood and vice versa so my being Iranian having lived in the U.S. for 40 years means nothing and this is what I can answer to Mohammed's conversation with me the question of Haifan I don't know what the as soon as you say I'm an Arab-American you have cross essentialized Arab and American as if there are only one kind of Arab and one kind of American the Haifan cross authenticates them both whereas far more realistic is this diversity and multiplicity of the group affiliations with which we are identified that is you professionally may identify with somebody who lives actually in the in the enemy land as it were but the most I mean we just saw this fantastic play last night about a Lebanese poet and Israeli translator who is in love with his country so I mean suddenly poetry become aware that creates two people that are supposed to be each other's enemies I mean the whole drama is because of this crossing of these two boundaries that generates a tertiary mode of solidarity that I mean the whole drama is that they have to surpass that and the homoerotic aspect helps it but this is far more real than anything Aviv Moghrabi look at the thing Israeli documentary filmmaker has a documentary called Avenge but one of my two eyes I don't know if you have seen it it's absolute one of the best documentaries on the Palestinian situation by an Israeli documentary filmmaker Avenge but one of my two eyes what Aviv does is he goes and asks Israelis to talk about their experience of holocaust as holocaust survivors and then visually he shows the predicament of Palestinians and Israelis and be known to themselves are providing a narrative of a Palestinian predicament and the result is a fantastic documentary hope it makes some sense I'm sorry we have just a short time for questions we're going to take just one more and I invite you all to approach Dr. Dabashi and speak more during the lunchtime or the breaks but yeah so we have one more time for questions thank you so much Dr. Dabashi you're wonderful Dr. I have a question I'm going to preface my question below in the description of myself so I'm a supposed to be a so-called Arab Shia, some Kurdish Turkish according to some writers I've told me I war with myself what I've noticed as a document is that there is this notion that a lot of us have a return and returning to something and I hope you could maybe talk to me or talk to us a little bit about this idea of return the pitfalls and the dangers and maybe we are the greater what is it that we're really thinking about aspiring towards when we talk about return just like every other great question you asked is in it the hybridity the multifaceted aspect which is real I'm sure it's very similar to my identity I also come from a southern part of the world and it made it even more attractive and the result of that without Shia mother very white in complexion green nets and like brown eyes and as socialist father very dark black in his complexion the column that you see the black and so we had a little bit of a hotel or there's no more situation mine is a charm and they married and they loved each other and they had three sons so obviously they had a splendid time so many people say how could you be a Muslim and then socialist and then to make it even more exciting we had a Mullah Javad the line Mullah Javad will come once a month and he was Khomeini activist he was back in the 60s my father the other thing is he was involved in the railroad so three weeks of the month that he had money for his vodka and cooking for us and listening to Uncle Sum and Abdul Baha he was a complete musad nationalist fourth week of the month he ran out of money he had finished his vodka so he couldn't do anything when he was cooking listening to the things so he became an ulcerer socialist in the fourth week of the month see this but biographical by way of saying and then depending when Mullah Javad came they got into a discussion that it differed once a month whether he hits my father in his nationalist three weeks or socialist the privilege that in that real fantastic cosmetic reality returned to God before I'm supposed to return to where first of all there is no return 1997 I was just in 1997 I went back to you know after 90 years I mean it was a completely different line radically different line I moved from New Jersey to New York I moved from Columbia already just crossing the Hudson River you see the thing is you never step in that river twice we change, we value we become different creatures so this return is actually a fiction because there is no home to return home is where you hang your hat and say no to power finish to finish the Q&A thank you so much she let's give him another round of applause