It is our second day of tech rehearsals for my play Peanut Butter and Blueberries and a strange feeling has settled in the room. The theatre walls and stage door are thick, but not thick enough to keep out the reality of racist and Islamophobic violence on our streets over the past week and a half. On the set of a story about two young Muslims, with a creative team of mainly Muslims and people of colour, the line between real and surreal suddenly feels more blurred.
Given the heightened violence this month, part of me questions if a love story is the right story to tell right now, but another part of me is adamant that it is. In the play, Hafsah and Bilal are contending with precisely the sorts of questions I, and so many others, have found themselves sitting with. In times of increased racism and the accompanying hypervisibility that comes with it, loving others often feels a vulnerable thing to do. The more we love and the more people we choose to love, the more we expose ourselves to the potential of pain as our worry must widen its wings and our concern extends beyond what we can actually control.
While much of my past writing has dealt explicitly with racism and Islamophobia – dissecting and exploring them in the long view of history, and beyond their obvious manifestations – this play does something slightly different. I wanted to look less at the violence that shapes our lives and more at the love, care and lightness that we experience and choose to engage in, in spite of surveillance, policing and racism.
Subsequently, this play has allowed me to look at the ways that sociopolitical and economic realities seep into our lives even when they are not what the story is about. To me this was essential because the usual stories we hear about Muslims are full of tropes that allow us only to exist in relation to terrorism – as victims or villains. The conflict of the play is often an internal conflict a character has between their faith and religion and their hopes and dreams. For me these kinds of stories betray and do no justice to the realities of Muslims’ lives in the UK.
At a time where 50% of the Muslim population in Britain live below the poverty line, and 18% of the prison population is Muslim despite being only 6.5% of the overall population, and when politicians and journalists brazenly target and dog-whistle Islamophobia, it is strange to me that the major conflict of stories with Muslim protagonists is an internal one.
Instead, in Peanut Butter and Blueberries, Bilal and Hafsah are simply two university students who accidentally find something in one another. But the world they are in unavoidably shapes the choices they make and how they can or cannot look after each other. When the state sanctions policing of Muslims and surveillance through counter-extremism policies like Prevent, even a quiet giggle in the library can make a couple vulnerable to securitisation. Likewise, a phone call after weeks of silence can be suddenly robbed of its emotional depth by the panic induced by strangers on the train.
Ultimately, Peanut Butter and Blueberries has accidentally become a very timely play this summer. Many of us would prefer not to think about the racist violence up and down the country, but even when we don’t want to, it haunts us. It seeps into our physicality, informs our choices to be seen and unseen, to go out or stay in; and, as with this play, our choices regarding who we love and our capacity and ability to love and be loved.
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Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, poet and educator
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Peanut Butter and Blueberries is at the Kiln theatre, London, until 31 August