How do my politics influence my art?

Lately I’ve been asking myself about what right I have to represent something, to represent a character. What right do I have to play a woman in a hijaab, in a web series I’m developing with my creative and comedic partner, Radhika Vaz?

Can I represent ideas, cultural ways of being, my own interpretations of oppression stemming from a patriarchal context, even if I don’t subscribe to such notions any more in my life? Or do my current religious choices limit my ability to represent things? Do I have the right to play a provocative character that wear a hijaab, even though personally I don’t choose to wear one?

Can I play a lesbian, if I consider myself heterosexual? Can I talk in a different accent than my own, or is that inauthentic?

I am an artist, a thinker, a performer, an entertainer, and someone who likes to ask difficult questions that come from my own personal struggles and truth. Do I have to defend that to please the masses?

The world would throw you fireballs if it had them. It would take whatever you do and mix it with its own filters and dampen it with its fears. The only thing we can all do is find what makes sense in our core, in the fire pit, and breathe from there, because if we haven’t offended enough people, how will people change? People don’t change when their views are reinforced, they change when they are challenged and have the courage to look into their past and see things that don’t work, that don’t make sense. A rejection of the old; a recreation for the new.

As an artist I’m not here to defend my political orientation against what others may say or think, I’m here to live on my own edge. I’m here to have my own inquiry about how I see the world and how I share it.

If you like it, then you like my art, and if you don’t, then you don’t like my art, and if it makes you mad, then the art has landed.