Busy Being Black

For many of us who’ve grown up in the so-called West, our understanding of what belly dancing is has been shaped by colonialism’s legacy. What we’ve learned about or encountered as belly-dancing is actually a white-washed mishmash of several cultures, designed to play into the West’s fascination with and manufactured fear of those designated Muslim. My guest today, Shrouk El-Attar, is an LGBTQ rights campaigner, electronics engineer and belly dancer from Egypt. She is currently working on a piece of interactive art – a belly-dancing robot – which troubles the line between technology and human, and between the east and west. Her desire is to return belly-dancing, or more accurately Egyptian dancing, to its roots – which, she reminds us, has little to do with the movement of the belly and was never a practice restricted to women.

Today we explore her experience as an asylum seeker, her fascination with technology and the moment she learned the people in her television set were there through the magic of engineering. She shares what she’s learned about nations and borders and citizenship, the joy, refusal and revolution enabled through dance, and how she’s turned her life experience and passion into both art and activism.

About Shrouk El-Attar

Shrouk El-Attar is an LGBTQ rights campaigner, electronics engineer and belly dancer from Egypt. She was named one of BBC’s 100 Most Influential Women in the World 2018, UNHCR Young Woman of the Year 2018, and one of the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Top 6 Young Women Engineers in the UK in both 2019 and 2020. She is one of two artists taking part in Watershed’s Winter Residences programme, which offers artists the opportunity to develop their ideas with the financial, critical, and technical support of Watershed.

Watershed is the leading film culture and creative technology centre in the South West of England and champions engagement, imagination and ingenuity, working locally, nationally and globally from Bristol.

About Busy Being Black

Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.

Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community.

Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter.

Busy Being Black’s artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black.

Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack

Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout.

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PJ Samuels is a poet, educator and LGBTQ human rights activist whose work interrogates issues of race, gender, patriarchy, identity and belonging. I first encountered her searing, moving and beautiful poetry in the Sista! Anthology, a collection of essays and poetry from women-loving-women of African and Caribbean descent. She is an emotional and intellectual force. Today, we discuss her relationship to God and with Christianity and the way both religion and Blackness have historically been weaponised against Black people. She elaborates on her refusal to make her life and her Blackness performative, and how she does this through a tenacious yet gentle pursuit of joy. She takes us back to her origins in rural Jamaica, how her experience as a refugee made her reevaluate all of her relationships, how she remembers to engage her wonder and her curiosity, and her thoughts on roots, freedom and love.This conversation is big and it is beautiful. There are some long pauses throughout this conversation because PJ literally rendered me speechless with her thoughts, passion, intellect, and her absolute commitment to Black women.

https://pjsamuels.wordpress.com/

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@_busybeingblack is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. If you like what you hear, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe; doing so lets others like us hear the voices amplified here. #busybeingblack

Thank you to our partners, UK Black Pride and BlackOut UK.

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My conversation this week is with queer Black poet and storyteller Jubi Arriola-Headley. Among his altogether brilliant debut collection of poetry is the tremendous "Every God Is a Slowly Dying Sun" — a heartbreaking reflection on Jubi’s relationship with the late poet Craig G Harris.

original kink is available now from Sibling Rivalry Press.

About Busy Being Black

Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: retweets, ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.

Thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community.

Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary mastermind based in New York City – for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter. Busy Being Black’s artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black.

Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack

Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at my favourite publisher, Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’m still revelling in an acute awe, inaugurated by the images captured by the Just Wonderful Space Telescope in July. As a big and beautiful conversation about our significance continues, a persistent narrative about how small we are has emerged and I suspect that the language deployed to make us insignificant as we gaze at the stars, has something to do with the dominant culture’s denuding of our imaginations, which my guest today says require an emotional athleticism.

To help us reckon with our collective awe and our responsibility to harness our imaginations for the futures we deserve, I’m in conversation with Ahmed Best. Ahmed is a multi-hyphenate story teller, artist, educator, and futurist – as well as an Adjunct Professor at USC School of Dramatic Arts and the Stanford d. school. You may also know him as the actor who played Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars. We explore afrofuturism as an imaginative framework that helps us work through current and oppressive realities in order to fashion a future worthy of us all. And the need for Black people – especially – to take seriously the project of engaging with what Ahmed calls long futures. He reminds us that the oppressions so many of us live through now are the result of someone’s imagination. If we are to have any chance of helping shape the future, we don’t have the luxury of not thinking about it.

Together with Dr Lonny Brooks, Ahmed helps facilitate AfroRithms from the Future – a collaborative, design thinking, storytelling game that helps activate our radical imaginations by centring the experiences and wisdoms of Black people and BIPOC. You can hear more of Ahmed in conversation about the power of our collective imagination and defining futures we can all inhabit on The Long Time Academy.

This conversation was made possible with funding from the AZ Creative Fund.

Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers.

About Busy Being Black

Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.

Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.

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Alexander Leon is a rising star in the community and his new YouTube channel is a Godsend. His searing yet bubbly takes on LGBTQ life are a welcome counter to the often toxic conversations we hear in the media and he is such a fabulous example of what happens when we lean into ourselves. Today, we explore how he navigates his mixed-race identity, what he feels is his role as a mediator between cultures, ideas and beliefs and how he’d like the conversation around the mental health crisis in the LGBTQ community to change. Importantly, he calls us to consider how we create space for different approaches to a common problem because what we may consider divergent approaches to our activism are perhaps more complementary than we think. As you do when you’re chatting with friends, our conversation takes a few tangents, including into a discussion about Louis de Berniere’s magical realism trilogy and the celebration of mestizos in Colombia.

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Head over to Alex's YouTube channel, where you can watch videos like Sexual Racism in the LGBTQ Community.

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One of our dedicated listeners is doing some doctoral research and invites you to take part. The study aims to observe how different social factors can expose individuals to stress and how this may link to various mental health outcomes, including how single and multiple social identities may correlate to exposure to stress. You could win a £50 Amazon voucher. Find out more here.

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@_busybeingblack is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Supporting this podcast doesn't cost any money; your retweets, ratings, reviews, shares and feedback all help, so please keep it all coming #busybeingblack

Of course, if you want to and have the means, you can support Busy Being Black financially and help make it all happen: paypal.me/busybeingblack.

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Thank you to our partners:

UK Black Pride

BlackOut UK

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