‘I wanted to see stories about our experience’: For 25 years Mizna has helped artists make cultural connections
Its mission has been to amplify the voices of Arab, Southwest Asian and North African artists
At a dance studio in Minneapolis recently, Leila Awadallah reflected on what Mizna means to her.
“When I found Mizna, that’s when I unlocked this portal into this beautiful world of Arab Americans and of stories from countries that I longed to know deeper,” Awadallah said.
The choreographer and dancer is half white, half Palestinian and grew up in South Dakota.
She’s one of the many artists who say they’ve found a place of belonging and cultural connection through Mizna.
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Kathy Haddad and Saleh Abudayyeh founded Mizna in the late ‘90s as a platform for contemporary literature, film, art and cultural production — highlighting the work of Arab, Southwest Asian and North African, or SWANA artists.
Its cornerstone event is the annual Arab Film Festival.
As the organization marks its 25th anniversary in the Twin Cities, Haddad looks back on what motivated her to start it all.
“I wanted to see stories about our experience, about my experience. I read, and was inspired by Asian American writers, African American writers and lots of writers. And I didn’t see any Arab American writers,” Haddad said.
Mizna Executive and Artistic director Lana Barkawi is Palestinian and joined the organization in 2011. She says the organization has played a critical role in connecting creatives to their cultural identity.
“The things that motivated the establishment of the organization still hold true today that we exist in a cultural context that marginalizes us and really, you know, boxes us into stereotyped ideas of who we are,” Barkawi said.
Since its founding, Mizna, the Arabic word for ‘a desert cloud that holds the promise of rain,’ has featured more than a thousand Arab and SWANA writers in its literary journal both locally and internationally.
One of those writers is Marlin M. Jenkins — a half Lebanese, half Black writer and high school English teacher who’s been published by Mizna.
“I think Mizna has really helped me find that I think there’s a lot of what I have learned about myself and about the world of what it means to be from Southwest Asia that wasn’t able to come from my immediate family. A lot of that comes through the arts, especially through writing and poetry,” Jenkins said.
Awadallah says she was visiting family in the Palestinian town of Beit Jala in the occupied West Bank in October but had to leave and come back to the U.S.
She says she feels her body is still in her ancestral land. A recent performance for Mizna helped connect her to the part of herself that’s still in Palestine.
“My body started coming back and my voice started coming back and I was held by the Mizna community and so many others, the room was so full of people who are just ready, you know, to sob and to let the feelings be real together,” Awadallah said.
Barkawi says times have been exceptionally tough for the organization and its artists.
“Well, you know, we’re marking our anniversary, and it feels difficult to be in a very celebratory mood because we’re witnessing a shattering and grotesque cruelty in Gaza,” she said.
Her hope is that she no longer feels the need to emphasize a heightened importance of the organization’s work.
“We’re more than our traumas, we’re more than the portrayals of us,” Barkawi said.
She says the goal is to reclaim narratives and tell stories without always responding to tragedy, and to create an unburdened place for artists to create work on their own terms.
