You are invited to come, to listen and to share.

All welcome on the OPEN MIC

7 minute vignettes

We are tickled pink to be hosting Ayesha Mona for our July offering, the intelligent, soft and fierce force that she is.

Ayesha is currently writing her first novel in the genre of magical realism to explore themes of hyper-capitalism/domination critiquing systems of patriarchy based on her early childhood experiences in Saudi Arabia.

She’s a poet, actor, model and runs writing workshops at black spark centred around liberation through exploring spirituality, activism and creativity as portals of reimagination.

"As a femme presenting woman in a diabolic world where identity performance has become attached to net-worth, consequences of calling out bullshit and being truthful difficult to bear, uncomfortability of any kind results in the continuum of projection, rage and the final step - severing ties. "

This months theme is Perception Politics:

"Perception politics circles my mind like a calculated answer to every ‘how are you?’

The self algorithm comes from anxious morning thoughts of the never ending to do list that satiates feeling needed, desiring to be seen, clapped about.

Will I heal enough to care less about the shape of perception?

the critical angles of double squares which make a circus of repetitive behaviour, reinforcing the same hyper-capitalist bullshit that blocks me from actualising creation myths

flipping the script
stripping the lies
tearing apart dogma

You are invited to share a stories in around around theses ideas.

"Feeling the pain of my back, the shards of glass still found at different meridian points of my spine, I am deeply glad that my love and quest for truth seeking often leads me to breaking concepts of illusive reality. So I ask my spine questions and my shoulders tell me that I don’t need to perform resistance or love. I am both and I will always be both because living in our current world, there’s not a single day that goes by where I am not resisting against some racist subtle projection or a misogynistic remark, or critique of how I could be better. No more chasing that version of myself I always wanted to be, because I am already her and I was always her but the mirror was broken and foggy. It was hard to see. It really is more about remembering through the fragmentation, having the glue of compassion to understand, why the dismembering of my parts happened to begin with that led to performing in order to be seen, then grabbing that sharpie and rewriting the entire script on the mirror."