Date: Saturday, 01 July 2017
“I saw the news [of Hassanen's horrible death] pop up on my Twitter feed,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep that night. I was so triggered, so overwhelmed.” A Muslim and immigrant herself, Saleh couldn’t focus on her work the next day. “What am I going to do with this emotion?” she thought.
She began to write a poem.
Saleh knew almost immediately that it would be a video. “The visual just came to me,” she says. “This is very sad material, so I wanted to evoke that, but also create a space for healing. I wanted it to be very meditative, and I wanted to make people find relief.”
The pieces includes flower imagery as a way to symbolize life and change. Saleh also conjures spirituality, with references to Islamic terminology and prayers. “I wanted something that memorialized her,” Saleh says. “Something that would memorialize what she went through, to create space for her and to be able to grieve.”
Fluent in poetry, spoken word, and music, Saleh doesn’t like to be put in a box. She plans to release a musical project later this year. Thematically, she does touch on political and social topics, but there's also love, fun, and more carefree themes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAG4lChEPr0
