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"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

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Tag: Loolwa Khazzoom

Trying to fix broken wings

Not fitting in. Being misunderstood and miscategorized. These are recurring themes in Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage, edited by Loolwa Khazzoom, a Seattle writer, musician, activist and occasional contributor to the Independent.

image - Flying Camel book coverThe book was first released in the 1990s and was recently re-released.

“I wish I could say that this book is no longer as revolutionary, cutting-edge, or as needed as it was when I began compiling it in 1992, but, unfortunately, that is not the case,” writes Khazzoom, the daughter of an Iraqi Jew, in the new introduction. “Even though there have been changes – shifts in consciousness, language, and even representation – Mizrahi and Sephardi women remain overall excluded, in theory and practice, from spaces for women, Jews, Middle Easterners, people of colour, LGBTQI folk, and even Mizrahim and Sephardim. In addition, so many of the presumably inclusive conversations about us seem basic and superficial, with an undertone of it being a really big deal that these conversations exist at all.”

Khazzoom’s struggle to fit in led her to Seattle, in large part because it is home to one of the largest Sephardi communities in the United States. But even in that milieu she found herself an outsider.

“In June 2014, however, on the first sh’bath [Sabbath] after driving my U-Haul up the coast from Northern California, I was appalled by a sermon so sexist – where women were equated with ‘meat’ – that I walked out of the Sephardi synagogue, just 15 minutes after arriving,” she writes.

“I have been a hybrid all my life, forever caught between two or more worlds,” writes Caroline Smadja in her contribution to the collection. It is a state of being that is shared by many of the writers.

Yael Arami, born in Petah Tikvah to parents from Yemen, speaks of others’ perceptions of her.

“In Germany, I have had to avoid certain areas, fearing local skinheads’ reaction to my skin colour. In France, I have been verbally ridiculed and insulted for being yet another ignorant North African who does not know French,” she writes. “In California, people’s best intentions have resulted in a number of social blunders: When I left a tip in a San Francisco café, I got a courteous ‘gracias’ from the politically correct Anglo waiter. After a predominantly African-American gospel group sang at a Marin County synagogue, several members of the congregation approached me, to express their admiration for our wonderful gospel performance! It seems that wherever I go in white-majority countries, I am, in accordance with local stereotypes, seen as the generic woman of colour – Algerian in France, African-American or Puerto Rican in California.”

Rachel Wahba, an Iraqi-Egyptian Jew, calls out politically correct hypocrisy.

“Sometimes, when I bring up the oppression of Jews in Arab countries, progressive Jews get strangely uncomfortable – as if recognizing the Jewish experience under Islam would make someone racist and anti-Arab,” she writes. “During my mother’s cancer support group intake, I listened as my mother told her story of living in Baghdad and surviving the Farhud. She ended with an ironic ‘I survived the Arabs to get cancer?’ The Jewish oncology nurse was shocked that my mother was so ‘blunt.’

“Should we revise our history? Leave out the details of our oppression under Islam? Pretend my mother never saw the Shiite merchants in Karballah wash their hands after doing business with her father, because he was a ‘dirty Jew?’”

The book’s title comes from an essay by Lital Levy, “How the Camel Found Its Wings” and an Israeli film of the same name.

The metaphor involves the repair of a broken statue of a flying camel, which actually stood at the entrance to the international fairgrounds in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. In the film, the two wings of the camel become stand-ins for a dichotomy that mostly excludes Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews and yet still casts them in a negative light.

“By the end of the screening, the camel had found two new wings, and I got to thinking,” writes Levy. “I started putting my own pieces together – making my own flying camel out of the remnants of the past, borrowing missing pieces from the present, and using my imagination and willpower to try to make it all stick together. The pieces of my own American childhood, the histories that preceded it in Israel and in Iraq, and the challenges I see before me in my work are the various fragments I have been remembering and re-membering into an integral whole. I do not yet know its shape – camel, dromedary, llama, yak – but I do not care, as long as it will fly.”

Posted on April 8, 2022April 7, 2022Author Pat JohnsonCategories BooksTags equality, essays, Flying Camel, identity, Jewish heritage, Loolwa Khazzoom, Mizrahi, racism, Sephardi, women
Khazzoom has new EP

Khazzoom has new EP

The cover of Iraqis in Pajamas’ new album, Pijamama, features Loolwa Khazzooom’s grandfather, Abraham Khazzoom.

The multifaceted, multicultural and impossible-to-pigeonhole Loolwa Khazzoom is back, along with her band, Iraqis in Pajamas, with a studio-produced album, Pijamama, that was released on July 16.

The new album by the Seattle-based musician honours her mother, E.J., who passed away on July 16, 2019, and who encouraged Khazzoom to pursue her music. Khazzoom credits E.J. with demonstrating that we all have “the ability to radically transform ourselves and our relationships – and to stop the crushing boulder of intergenerational trauma – when are willing to face and go through the darkness together.”

A photo of Khazzoom’s grandfather, Abraham Khazzoom, who she describes as “the original Iraqi in pajamas,” graces the album’s cover. The band’s name, she explained, derives from an uncomplimentary reputation Iraqi expatriates had in the Israeli city of Ramat Gan for putting on their pajamas when they had arrived home and the work of the day was completed.

The EP features Khazzoom on vocals and bass, Robbie Morsehead on drums, Cali Hackmann on keyboard and backup vocals, and Alden Hackmann on guitar. The melodies and lyrics were written by Khazzoom. Pijamama showcases three songs.

“Mahalnu” explores the  Jewish practice of asking forgiveness ahead of Yom Kippur. It then raises the question of what happens when someone asks for forgiveness, without changing their behaviour, especially in the case of violence. “What is the difference between forgiveness of you and erasure of me?” Khazzoom asks.

“The Fixer,” a declarative prayer, advocates the rejection of compensating for another person’s not doing necessary work in a relationship. The chorus, “ashir shir hadash” (“I will sing a new song”), comes from “Ezer Musarai,” an Iraqi Jewish song for Purim, which inspired Khazzoom as a child.

“Fireball” looks at being a caregiver in spite of emotional violence. The lyrics proclaim: “You can be downright vicious / Throwing a fireball / At the one who cares most about you / The one who is always there for you….”

photo - Loolwa Khazzoom
Loolwa Khazzoom (photo from Iraqis in Pajamas)

Khazzoom has had a varied career. Among other things, she has been an educator, writer and health coach, all of which share, she says, the central principle of individual and collective healing. Ultimately, Khazzoom says she “ditched her power suit and Powerpoint in favour of combat boots and cat glasses to offer bold songwriting as the catalyst for deep and heart-centred conversation.”

The connections between her diverse activities have been subjects she has long contemplated.

“I have been keenly aware of interconnectedness since I was very young, partly because I was highly sensitive and thinking about things deeply, and partly because my identities were a crisscross of those considered at odds or even at war with each other – making it obvious to me that many social constructs and divisions were false,” Khazzoom explained.

“My songs reflect this awareness – explicitly or implicitly connecting dots between things that most people don’t initially recognize as being related to each other, and inviting listeners to rethink their notions and paradigms.”

Khazzoom said she likes to play with this crisscross of identities. For example, people may react one way if she tells them she is Iraqi, and another way if she tells them she is Jewish.

“People generally like shortcuts or scripts in determining what to think about someone, instead of doing the work of getting to know someone, with all the complexity and nuance involved…. I am the same person, yet an entirely different set of assumptions are projected on to me. Standing at the intersection of identities and experiences, I can poke fun at the absurdity of it all,” she said.

Khazzoom refers to her music as “conscious rock,” a way of exploring all our emotions, especially those that allow us to be loud in a healthy way.

“As a collective, we fear intense emotions like rage and grief, and we suppress those feelings in ourselves and others, leading to astronomical levels of addiction and a host of other social and personal ills,” she said. “I believe that all of our emotions are a gift, a GPS system of sorts, pointing us in the direction of that which is true and good, and I find it tremendously liberating, healing and transformative, to express the spectrum of emotions in healthy and constructive ways.”

Khazzoom’s songs are written in English, Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew, and blend Iraqi Jewish prayers, alternative rock and personal storytelling about subjects ranging from cancer, racism and mental illness to national exile.

For more information, visit iraqisinpajamas.com. To participate in the evolution of Loolwa’s work, from poem to spoken word performance to song, go to patreon.com/khazzoom?fan_landing=true.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Format ImagePosted on August 27, 2021August 25, 2021Author Sam MargolisCategories MusicTags alternative rock, health, Iraqis in Pajamas, Loolwa Khazzoom, Pijamam, prayer, storytelling, world music, Yom Kippur
Video on healing, light

Video on healing, light

Loolwa Khazzoom in Iraqis in Pajamas’ video for their song “Cancer Is My Engine,” to be released on Chanukah. (photo by Ailisa Newhall)

With shared themes of finding light in the darkness, Seattle-area band Iraqis in Pajamas is releasing the video for their song “Cancer Is My Engine” on Chanukah.

Amid the global pandemic, volunteer cast and crew drove in from across Washington state, donning masks and practising social distancing, to film the music video against the backdrop of the Olympic Peninsula forest.

The video tells the story of front woman Loolwa Khazzoom’s choice to reject the conventional thyroidectomy treatment for thyroid cancer, despite medical and financial pressure. Khazzoom instead chose to approach the diagnosis as an opportunity for radically transforming her life, such as by going vegan and practising numerous forms of mind-body medicine. (See jewishindependent.ca/healing-powers-of-song.)

After cold-stopping the growth of the nodules for years, through these measures, Khazzoom moved to Washington state from California, returned to her lost love of music, and launched her band, which combines ancient Iraqi Jewish prayers with original alternative rock. Immediately following, the thyroid nodules began shrinking. Through magical realism and metaphor, the music video reveals how, by listening to her inner voice, Khazzoom self-healed through her actual voice, by singing – the ability to do which may have been destroyed by a thyroidectomy, given the proximity of the thyroid gland and vocal chords.

The video begins with Khazzoom standing at the edge of a cliff, singing the opening line of the song, “Cancer is my engine.” As she sings, a candle is lit by her voice. She is transported to a forest, where she is searching in the dark with the light of that candle. She comes across a stuffed bear – representing Khazzoom’s mother – and picks it up, then continues on her quest.

An insurance agent and doctor appear and begin chasing Khazzoom. As she runs from them, she comes to a fork in the road – with the doctor on one side and the insurance agent on the other. She pauses, then runs forward, where there is no path, heading toward the light. She keeps running until she comes to a cliff and jumps off it.

photo - Loolwa Khazzoom in the “Cancer Is My Engine” video
Loolwa Khazzoom in the “Cancer Is My Engine” video. (photo by Ailisa Newhall)

She lands in the middle of a drumming circle and starts dancing wildly. A few scenes later, she is drumming in the middle of the circle, and everyone else is dancing around her. Both circles represent the pivotal importance of music and dance in Khazzoom’s healing. The video then shifts from magical realism and metaphor to real-life shots, with the band playing music in a vegetable patch in Khazzoom’s garden, representing Khazzoom’s regimen of juicing daily and eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet. The video ends with Khazzoom standing on the edge of the cliff and singing the last words of the song, in the original a cappella Iraqi Jewish prayer that exalts the power of the Divine.

The video was sponsored by nonprofit Healing Journeys and funded by the Lloyd Symington Foundation, both of which offer programs for people living with and healing from cancer.

Studies on the healing possibilities of music are documented in books like The Power of Music by Elena Mannes and The Healing Power of Sound by oncologist Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, and the National Institutes of Health has launched a series of studies on the healing powers of music. Whether singing lullabies or sacred chants, mothers and religious leaders have known for millennia what scientists are only beginning to understand. Singing bypasses our mental process, both awakening and soothing us at the core. Among other benefits, we are able to access, release and heal from the experience of trauma, without having to recount and risk getting triggered by painful memories.

Khazzoom has had a career as an educator, activist, journalist, health coach, and more, all with the central organizing principle of individual and collective healing. Her work has been featured in media including the New York Times and Rolling Stone; she has presented at venues including Harvard University and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre; and she has published two books, which are taught at universities nationwide.

Iraqis in Pajamas comprises Khazzoom on both vocals and bass, Sean Sebastian on guitar and Robbie Morsehead on drums. The trio opens up audiences to contemplation about trauma, healing and transformation, whether addressing domestic violence, cancer, racism, mental illness, street harassment, family caregiving or national exile.

 

Format ImagePosted on December 4, 2020December 2, 2020Author KHAZZOOMusicCategories MusicTags cancer, Chanukah, healing, health, Iraqis in Pajamas, Loolwa Khazzoom, Robbie Morsehead, Sean Sebastian, Seattle
Healing powers of song

Healing powers of song

Seattle-based Iraqis in Pajamas, left to right: Sean Sebastian, Loolwa Khazzoom and Robbie Morsehead. (photo from Iraqis in Pajamas)

How do you take the wisdom of surviving and turn it into beautiful things?” asked Loolwa Khazzoom, front woman for Seattle-based punk rock group Iraqis in Pajamas, during an interview with the Independent recently.

One cannot easily classify Khazzoom, a cancer survivor, in a succinct journalistic fashion. Aside from being a musician, she is a writer, an activist, a polyglot and a journalist. Raised in California to an American mother and an Iraqi father, she was heavily involved in the Jewish feminist movement of the 1990s and the founder of the Jewish Multicultural Project, which provided resources about diversity to Jewish groups.

As with her stage presence, she transmits a raw, infectious energy in conversation, ever more so as Iraqis in Pajamas started this month by releasing a new single.

“Life brings with it an endless number of challenges. Negative experiences can be turned into art,” Khazzoom reflected.

“I was diagnosed with cancer in 2010,” she said. “I rejected the conventional option of surgery – despite a doctor proclaiming that I would die without it. ‘You can’t think your way out of cancer,’ he said, to which I replied, ‘You don’t know what I can do.’”

After the diagnosis, Khazzoom researched natural approaches to healing, and radically altered her diet – pulling everything out of her cupboards and moving to an all-organic and vegan diet. Through these and subsequent diet and lifestyle changes, she said she was able to stop the growth of the nodules, which remained stable for the next five years. The nodules began shrinking when she returned to music – her lost passion.

Formed in 2015, Iraqis in Pajamas combines ancient Iraqi Jewish prayers with its own original style of punk rock sung in English, Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The band’s songs examine a wide number of social issues – domestic violence, racism, mental illness, family caregiving, national exile – and cancer.

The band received a grant to produce the song “Cancer Is My Engine,” which was released March 1. “Cancer Is My Engine” combines an ancient Iraqi Jewish prayer with original punk rock, sung in Hebrew and English – challenging conventional medical approaches to cancer and putting forth the concept of music as medicine.

The song was produced by Bard Rock Studio, an independent Northwest music producer, and funded by the Lloyd Symington Foundation, which supports people living with and healing from cancer.

According to Khazzoom, singing has the ability not only to uplift but to heal. “This shift in consciousness is why, after hearing a particular song, our mood may change abruptly, or we suddenly may feel transported back in time. Singing bypasses our mental process, both awakening and soothing us at the core, without effort. Among other benefits, we are able to access, release and heal from the experience of trauma, without having to recount and risk getting triggered by painful memories,” she said.

Iraqis in Pajamas, which also includes drummer Robbie Morsehead and guitarist Sean Sebastian, got its name from a reputation Iraqi expatriates in the Israeli city of Ramat Gan had for putting on their pajamas when they had arrived home and the work of the day was completed.

The band is currently developing its next project: a debut double album. One CD will be an original a cappella version of 10 Iraqi Jewish prayers, which the band incorporates into its songs, along with a story about each prayer and why they chose it, while the second CD will be the 10 songs with those prayers woven through them. The project is sponsored by Allied Arts Foundation in Seattle and, in February, the band launched a fundraising campaign to develop, produce and promote the album: secure.givelively.org/donate/allied-arts-foundation-seattle/iraqis-in-pajamas.

Khazzoom’s first book, Consequence: Beyond Resisting Rape (2002), is a look at sexual harassment in everyday life. In 2003, she edited The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage, an anthology of the writings of Mizrahi Jewish women. Her writing has also appeared in the Forward, Tikkun and Lilith, as well as the Jewish Independent and other Jewish publications; she has written several times about Israeli hip-hop for Rolling Stone.

Iraqis in Pajamas hopes to find venues in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island in the coming year. For more information about Khazzoom and the band, and to listen to their music, visit loolwa.com. To purchase their music, go to iraqisinpajamas.bandcamp.com.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Format ImagePosted on March 6, 2020March 4, 2020Author Sam MargolisCategories MusicTags cancer, health, Iraqi Jewish prayers, Loolwa Khazzoom, punk rock, Seattle
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