On Nov. 10, close to 40 students attended the online workshop Writing the Revolution led by poet, dancer, novelist Tishani Doshi, Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. It was organized by the team of Airport Road, the student’s creative journal.

“[The event hoped to give a space for artists in the community] to reflect on revolution, not only in its textbook definition, but also as building community, cultivating joy and self-care,” shared Yasmeen Tajiddin, Class of 2022 and member of the editorial board of the journal.

“I was asked to conduct the workshop as a way to generate some kind of material [as is done] in poetry classes where the idea of the prompt is used to kickstart ideas,” noted Doshi. The workshop, amongst other weekly prompts posted on the Student Life Facebook page, was an initiative taken by the team to cultivate a critical and creative response to the unofficial theme of revolution and to offer guidance to fellow students as they created works for the 12th Airport Road Issue.

Doshi continued: “[although] it may feel very artificial to be [given a prompt], sometimes there’s this inner-pipework inside us, which is the subconscious and it takes an external trigger to unleash [it].”

“When you’re a poet it’s fun to try on different voices,” she added. The evening brimmed with creativity as students read and wrote poems while exploring various subthemes, registers and stylistic methods. They experimented with creating contrapuntal to blending personal and borrowed melodies to shifting from “I” to “We” to voice their political concerns.

Doshi described this lofty function of poetry as one that enables us to see the invisible. It goes far beyond the poet and represents a core moment in history. “There are so many obstacles in trying to arrive at the truth … and poetry is able to counter the language of the news, politics and manipulation that otherwise desensitizes us to [knowledge],” she added.

On why she chose to approach Doshi to host the workshop, Tajiddin said, “[Doshi’s] work engages with and expands upon what it means to be a girl or woman in a patriarchal society ... [she is] continuously proving that our writing can be authentic to our [people of color] personhood and be just as poignant and literary as Shakespeare, if not more.”

Working towards submitting their pieces by Nov. 15 for the upcoming publication, artists were urged to inquire, confront and reimagine the normative and commonly politicized definitions of revolution and truth.

“I think it is essential [for Airport Road to] mark and honor this last summer, both for the lives lost and for the change we’ve experienced,” Tajiddin remarked.

“[This year’s] state-sanctioned murders of Black people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade [have] spurred an international outcry. [Even] beyond the United States [for that matter], we have seen revolutions like the Oromo struggle in Ethiopia, the femicides in Mexico and most recently the S.A.R.S protests in Nigeria,” she said.

Tajiddin further shared: “[T]here are many ways that we [people of color] embody revolution and it’s vital that we document and celebrate them, as well as places we can stand to do better.”

She reinforced the need to archive people who are radically changing their ways of being as they learn about, experience and partake in revolutions from all parts of the world. In a way, an exercise in the workshop of moving from “I” to “We” mirrored this purpose to find one’s community, group and “gain a sense of the universal,” as Doshi articulated.

In undertaking the responsibility of publishing the 12th issue, especially during the pandemic, Tijaddin also provided insight into the challenges experienced by the Airport Road.

“What I look forward to is our “choosing ceremonies”, where we all gather together with plenty of food and drink and debate the contentious pieces. [But] being online, we miss out on that in-person interaction and the energy that is in the room that meeting,” she said.

The team has actively tried to find ways around this shift to the virtual world and plan to have both online and printed copies of the issue available next semester.