I moved to New York when I was eight, from Oakland, California... I could start there but the real beginning was in Maldives. I was born in Malè city, capital of Maldives, during the dictatorship. Oppression is a concept I knew early, and one I would see in many different contexts of the world. I was born to two artists, my mother a fashion designer/entrepreneur; a Maldivian woman, stronger than the stones they used to throw at her as she walked to school, she was born a member of the resistance. My father, a poet and a prominent name in Oakland’s underground hip hop scene; a proud Jamaican man, a revolutionary wordsmith.  Both of them are warriors, they still shoot their words like spears or share them like medicines. I can thank them for my bravery, my inability to stand by and watch the horrors of the world play before me like a dystopian sitcom, my need to record; writing, drawing or film.

 

I tampered with many crafts, searching for a home in one of them. With everything I did, whether it be painting or spoken word: I found myself moving closer to film (my short stories were becoming screenplays, my drawings gained storylines). The layers of anger that being a woman of color in America comes with were finally revealing themselves in both beautiful and productive ways. The frustration that the Italian teacher who taught African American history instilled in me, leapt from my stomach and onto a page; my fear of local police, after watching them torment my loved ones and peers, had transformed into a screenplay. It was was an empowering realization: that my silence was combatable, that no one can give you a voice, they can only suppress what is already there.

 

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