Gradient Identities
Ahmed Naji: All the time, I was writing, I was writing secretly. But I ended up at the prison because of my novel. In prison, you start to rethink your life and your choices, and you doubt what you’re doing. You start to ask yourself, “is it worth it?” I mean, “writing, is it worth it to be here in the prison for a year or more?” It took me a long journey inside prison to come to this conclusion: “Well, it looks like I’m a writer, and I have to deal with writing in a serious way.”
SARA ORTIZ: That was BMI City of Asylum Fellow Ahmed Naji.
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SARA ORTIZ: Welcome to Black Mountain Radio, broadcast from the Mojave Desert. I’m Sara Ortiz.
SCOTT DICKENSHEETS: And I’m Scott Dickensheets.
ORTIZ: Welcome back. I’m so glad you’re here again.
DICKENSHEETS: It’s a pleasure to be here. I just picked up my radio voice from the dry cleaners, so I’m ready to go.
ORTIZ: [laughs] What is a radio voice even? What does that even mean?
DICKENSHEETS: It’s a slightly artificial self-conscious way I talk when there’s a microphone stuck in my face.
ORTIZ: Oh yeah, I can relate.
I’m excited about this episode, and I’m so glad you’re here as a guest host. For this episode, distinct personalities introspectively point a lens to their gradient identities. We hear from an oral historian, an exiled writer interrogating the cost of his art, a visual artist navigating ancestral legacy, and an exotic dancer examining dueling identities. All unearth personal truths. And our first segment is with your pal, former Desert Companion colleague Brent Holmes.
DICKENSHEETS: Yeah yeah -- he has a big heart, a large brain, and a very singular perspective on the world. I actually have a piece of his artwork in my house that is so wonderfully disturbing and disorienting that when a certain friend of the family came to the house, she would turn it around to face the wall so she wouldn’t have to engage with it!
ORTIZ: Can you describe it?
DICKENSHEETS: It’s an aggressively orange and blue portrait of a very strange figure with arms coming out of his eyes and a weird look on his face. It owns any room that it’s in.
ORTIZ: I can see how something like that would keep people’s attention.
DICKENSHEETS: I have to keep it in my home office now—it’s just too bold and beautiful for the rooms where all the decent people congregate.
Brent has been eliciting strong reactions for a long time as an artist and an activist. He has a compelling sense of how to use history as a means to investigate contemporary social structures. Much of his work examines epistemological warfare, the body, food, play, and cultural discourse.
ORTIZ: Brent recently had a solo exhibition titled Behold a Pale Horse at UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, which I had the pleasure of seeing. The exhibit, like Brent’s personal aesthetic, is one that embraces the cowboy. Of his exhibit, Brent said that the “cowboy serves as an avatar in the West.”
DICKENSHEETS: But, historically, it’s been a pretty limited avatar, representing only one of the many possible histories of the region.
ORTIZ: Well, in typical Brent fashion, he sets out to reclaim Black identity through western iconography. There was a video piece that I gravitated the most towards, titled “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” And in it, Brent filmed one of his visits to his mother’s family’s ranch in east Texas, where they’re enjoying a BBQ. There are lush green lands and picnic tables and mouth-watering barbecue. It reminded me of being back in Texas. Though if you pay close attention to the accompanying audio in the video, one might pick up that it’s actually racially inflammatory. He is connecting the past and the present, reconciling ugly truths and asking how we move forward.
In this piece, we’ll also hear from Lela Walker and her sons – descendents of the most famous black cowboy in American history, Nat Love. He was one of the few men of his ethnicity and generation to publish a biography and tell his own tale.
Here’s Brent Holmes.
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BLACK COWBOYS
BRENT HOLMES (NARRATION): Cowboy. Let’s break that term down.
[Sounds of horses galloping, gunshots and distant yelling]
In English, the original term for a person who tended cattle was a “cowherd”. The term “cowboy” was first used in print by Irish satirist Jonathan Swift in 1725 to describe children assigned the task of walking cattle and assisting cowherds.
From that humble beginning, the cowboy has become a central figure in the story America tells itself.
[Sound of cowbell rapidly ringing turns into a rhythmic beat]
Ruggedly self-sufficient, the cowboy stands apart. He’s a representation of masculinity and white supremacy, un-reliant on the surrounding culture. This image is so entwined with our national character that “cowboy” is shorthand for Americans all over the world.
[Music develops into a bassy, club beat reminiscent of Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”]
A radical individual existing beyond the normative freedoms bestowed upon any other group or class.
[Music fades out]
This is a myth, of course.
Almost every aspect of American life has been touched, if not outright invented, by Black folks. From music and fashion to the three-way traffic signal and the super-soaker, many of our most iconic cultural touchstones are imbued by irrefutable Blackness — but not the cowboy.
[Faint, laid-back music is heard in the background]
And yet, by some estimates, as many as 25% of cowboys in the West were Black. Another 35% were Latinx.
How many is that? Thousands.
So many that there’s a good chance that every major cattle drive included a Black cowboy or two.
In the early United States, before western expansion, the English meaning of cowboy was transposed to enslaved men of African descent who had been given the task of herding cows, a title befitting a class that could not be fully recognized to exist.
But after the Civil war, the term, like all things in America, began to move West.
[Sound of horses galloping and western style Americanana music]
No landscape looms larger in the perception of the United States at home and abroad than the West. Soaring mountain ranges, basins peppered with creosote and sagebrush, supine mesas — a land that is arid, windswept, and vast. It lends easy providence to the sublime.
The western era begins with the end of our nation’s greatest ideological conflict. The Civil War remains the first major statement in the long national dialogue surrounding America’s use, mistreatment, and obligation to Black minds and bodies. After the war, many freed slaves headed West, their skills in agriculture and ranching providing them new opportunities and something else: an unprecedented amount of personal freedom.
[Horses galloping and western, ho-down music plays in the background]
To talk about the Black cowboy is, inevitably, to talk about Nat Love.
The cowboy autobiographer is probably the most famous Black cowboy in American history with the possible exception of Texas’ “lone ranger” Bass Reeves.
[The Lone Ranger theme plays]
Yes, the Lone Ranger was Black.
So exceptional were Reeves’ exploits that they became catalogued and fictionalized. Somehow, a semi-literate former slave who arrested more than 3,000 criminals, who was known for his use of disguise and for leaving a silver dollar as his calling card, became a black-masked hero with white skin. A gritty Afro-reality whisked into easy Anglo-fantasy with an ever-loyal brown sidekick.
[Relaxed, mellow acoustic music, indicative of an open road, is heard in the background]
But Nat Love wrote his own story — a whole book: The Life and Adventures of Nat Love better known in the Cattle Country as “Deadwood Dick” by Himself; a True History of Slavery Days, Life on the Great Cattle Ranges and on the Plains of the "Wild and Woolly" West, Based on Facts, and Personal Experiences of the Author.
[Music pauses for emphasis]
That’s the title. Yeah..that’s the title.
In its pages, we find love in one larger-than-life adventure after another: He tells readers about riding his horse into a bar, scattering a crowd before ordering drinks for himself and his horse. He writes about almost being forced to marry a tribal chief’s daughter, escaping only after seeming to go along with their plan. He describes earning the nickname Deadwood Dick from the citizens of Deadwood, South Dakota after he had defeated all comers in riding, roping, and shooting.
Whether the veracity of his claims holds up, he does meet the criteria for American legends of the era.
[Music fades out]
HOLMES: Hi, Lela.
LELA WALKER: Hi, how are you doing?
HOLMES: I’m good how are you?
WALKER: I’m doing awesome.
HOLMES: I really appreciate you taking the time...
BRENT HOLMES (NARRATION): By chance, I found one of Nat Love’s descendants, Lela Love-Walker, living in Las Vegas raising her five sons, all unaware of their ancestral legacy.
Lela and her eldest sons Anthony and Darion were kind enough to speak with me about their notable progenitor.
HOLMES: Yeah, there’s a film; there’s actually a comic book. He’s included in almost every book about Blackness in the American West, and really one of the few Cowboys that wrote his own autobiography, which you can find online, by the way, for free. It’s a lot of purple prose, but it’s actually a really fascinating read with illustrations, and it explains everything from his early life as a slave all the way up until his retirement age from being a cowboy.
WALKER: So, before this, did you think that Black people would be in those stories like what your grandma watches, the Westerns and stuff like that?
ANTHONY: No, because, at my grandma’s house, when the shows are on about the Western, there is no Black people in those shows besides white people playing as cowboys.
DARION: Yeah. When she told me, I was a little surprised, honestly. I didn’t know any of that. It’s kind of cool though.
WALKER: Right, it gave me a sense of ownership being out here in the West. A lot of what I hear, either you were born a slave and then ended up being sharecroppers or farmers. Everybody’s from the south, you know what I’m saying?
That’s the story of my stepfather’s heritage or life. Most of the history and culture is the enslavement of our ancestors. So, it just seemed, again, like I had some sense of ownership to the west. And to have something else to say that we not only helped build America, not only through just slavery –
HOLMES: Before this, what did you see when you saw a cowboy or when you thought about the idea of a cowboy in the United States?
ANTHONY: So, what I visioned is there’s these small towns, and then they’re just...I’m not good at using description words.
WALKER: [laughs] It’s okay.
DARION: I think he means when they used to do standoffs and all the cowboy stuff.
ANTHONY: Yeah! That’s what I mean. And then, when I picture that, I don’t really see as much Black people, but when you bring a Black person into it, that’s like a whole other story for me.
WALKER: Well, for me, I’m not going to lie, when I saw his picture, I was like, “he’s kinda cool ain't he?” Just some of the pictures that we had seen, my husband was like, “oh no, I’m getting that picture blown up. It’s going in our house.”
HOLMES: Yeah, I’m very, very familiar with this image. It’s on the cover of three books, and he’s gorgeous. And you can’t deny it. He knows he’s beautiful. He knows he’s handsome. He know he fine.
WALKER: It’s just him. His hair looked like it was blown out [laughs]. It was tilted to the side. He had, I guess they would like to say, a whole bunch of swag going on.
ANTHONY: I thought it was super different. It was super different.
HOLMES: One of the things that I find fascinating about the Black cowboy specifically, because the cowboy is this icon of independence and confidence and of American might, and to not be able to incorporate that into the identities of Black folks.
That’s the discussion I want to have. As Black people in the United States, we’re told a lot about where we fit into history, but so much of it is opaque.
WALKER: Yeah, it’s very limited. It’s a certain type of confidence that he had. That is something that I feel should be a part of what we’re learning and a little bit more available to the masses.
[Classic upbeat Western music plays]
BRENT HOLMES (NARRATION): The Western era marked a high point in the liberties that a Black person like Nat Love could enjoy if they took up the cowboy mantle.
Segregation and bigotry aren’t very tenable when you’re tending a thousand head of livestock in open, dangerous country. The wild in Wild West meant steady travel across lawless plains in the service of the largest agricultural event of the time without the same social hierarchies placed upon Black people in cities and towns overrun by cultural convention and law enforcement, a kind of liberty most modern people can’t even comprehend. Massive wide-open spaces, landscapes that defy description, the silence of the wilderness and its indifference. In open country, one can find moments where the world has no masters.
[Horses galloping and mellow, soft music is heard in the background]
Jim Crow laws were in their fledgling period in the southeast and couldn’t spread effectively west during this period of rapid growth. To live as a cowboy was to be part of a rare moment of Black meritocracy, your value in society a reflection of your skill and alacrity in your trade, and, financially, it sure beat sharecropping.
The Wild West era was incredibly short. It began with the end of slavery and faded with the coming of the railroad. It was a period of immense social and technological change. For Nat Love, being a cowboy was just one of his careers. As the railroad began changing the American landscape, he became a Pullman porter, and, eventually, finished his life as a security guard in San Bernardino. I can only speculate what it must have been like to be born into slavery, become a cowboy, and live two decades into the 20th century.
For my part, it must be noted I come from cowboys. I was raised by a Texan Mother.
As a kid, we went to family roundups on our ranch in Egypt, Texas where we sat on an old barn and watched my older cousins rope and brand cattle.
Afterward, at the family reunion we rode horses, shot skeet, and ate a ton of pecan-wood-smoked meat.
I feel extremely privileged to have experienced a legacy lost to so many African Americans of my generation.
HOLMES: They got a rodeo every July, and, I'll be genuine, if you’ve never seen a Black man in a cowboy hat rope a steer to the Parliament Funkadelic, you’ve missed out on something really beautiful.
WALKER: Oh, I would love to go.
HOLMES: The invite is infinitely extended. So, whenever y’all can get there—
WALKER: Yeah! Because I would love to take all the boys there.
[Laid-back Western music, similar to that at the end of a cowboy movie, is heard in the background]
BRENT HOLMES (NARRATION): The erasure of people of color in the settler West is a two-fold problem. It withholds ownership of the building and development of the United States from Black and brown communities and it puts blinders on American identity. To incorporate Black cowboys into American iconography is to redefine one of the country’s core narratives. A story that is told for all its people is the true story of a nation.
While the Black cowboy should have become a figure of freedom and inspiration in Black culture, he has been one of its least acknowledged characters. Recently, though, artists like Solange Knowles, Mitski, Otis Kwame kye Quaicoe, and, of course, Lil Nas X have invoked the cowboy in an effort to reclaim it for Black Americans, to remind us that, while manifest destiny may not have a Black face, it’s really important to understand and be able to communicate about our ancestry, to have a really well-rounded depiction of ourselves, to see the value and the strides they made throughout their lives, and to compare those things to the strides we are trying to make in our lives, today.
[Music fades out]
That is the true gift of history.
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RESET
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ORTIZ: ….We’re back with another aural history from the Vegas Valley. To do this, we’ve once again partnered with the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
DICKENSHEETS: ... What I think is really valuable about oral histories is that they include memories, opinions, and distinct points of view not often captured in the flat chronology of history books. Through oral history we learn, first-hand, how people felt, what they saw, and what they care about.
ORTIZ: Yes, and Claytee White and her staff at the Oral History Center at UNLV Libraries have been doing that for so long and have been wonderfully generous in opening that archive to us. The archive exists on their website, which you should absolutely go to. Link is in shownotes? (I guess that's something people say when they have podcasts.)
When we invited Claytee into the studio to narrate this oral history, one of our associate producers (Layla Muhammad) had prepared her for a few questions. They were seated across from each other the way you and I, Scott, are seated. And it was an honor to see Claytee in her element. Layla asked her a question and Claytee just took a beat and masterfully shared the history of the Moulin Rouge – one that I've heard admittedly multiple times, but it felt like I was hearing it for the first time. I want to be Claytee when I grow up.
DICKENSHEETS: … Same here. If you’re from the Vegas Valley, you’re familiar with the story of the Moulin Rouge, the first integrated casino and a major destination for Black entertainers and audiences, for about six months.
And for this segment, Claytee White presents an oral history from the perspective of Anna Bailey. She was a professional dancer, and one of the first African-American women to hold a gaming license in the state.
ORTIZ: Here are Anna Bailey and Claytee White.
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AURAL HISTORY: ANNA BAILEY
CLAYTEE WHITE: Opening night at the Moulin Rouge has been talked about for years. People talk about the cocktail dresses. They talk about the wonderful entertainment there that evening. In the audience that evening were personalities from Los Angeles, and actresses of renown came to enjoy that kind of entertainment.
It was unusual, even for Las Vegas. The line of Black dancers appear on the cover of Life magazine with waiters trained in the best restaurants in the country. And they came here and they served the food in tuxedos with white gloves. It was supposed to have been just magnificent.
[Archive sound of a live show from Sammy Davis, Jr. plays in the background]
In May 1955, the nation's first major interracial hotel casino, the Moulin Rouge, opened in West Las Vegas. The Moulin Rouge attracted Black entertainers, such as Sammy Davis, Jr., Pearl Bailey, Louis Armstrong, and many others. Because of segregation, these headliners could play on the Las Vegas strip, but weren’t allowed to stay in those hotels.
The Moulin Rouge offered them a place to play and stay in fabulous fashion. For this aural history, we turn to the voice of Anna Bailey, a dancer and business owner.
ANNA BAILEY: We came out here in 55, 1955. This is my first time, and we were just excited about coming to Las Vegas, entertainment capital, but it was the Mississippi of the West then.
And they had 27 girls that came from different cities across the United States. This is where you want to be, and there was no telling that the agents would come and see you. And so, there was a possibility to some of the girls that go off maybe and do movies or something after that.
But the town was very, very prejudiced then. Like I said, we would go downtown and, if you try on a hat, you would have to buy that hat.
WHITE (NARRATION): I’m Claytee White, Director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV. On March 3rd, 1997, I sat down with Anna Bailey in her lovely home here in Las Vegas.
WHITE: [Voice fades in] Fine, how are you?
BAILEY: Good
WHITE: Now, could you give me the correct spelling of your first name?
WHITE (NARRATION): Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Bailey has been a professional dancer since the age of 13. Before settling in Las Vegas, she had traveled nationally and internationally in integrated shows. After marrying singer and MC Bob Bailey, the pair traveled and performed together with prominent African-American producer Clarence Robinson.
When Robinson was hired as the show producer at the new Moulin Rouge, he called upon the couple and brought them to Las Vegas.
VOICE OF UNNAMED ARCHIVAL NARRATOR: This is the one state that attracts like a magnet. And whether they come by car, rail or circle the city and drop in by plane, their eyes pop wide open with that first glimpse of Las Vegas.
BAILEY: We thought it was on the strip. So, when they met us at the airport with cameras, and television, and just everything, we was just so thrilled and they put us in limousines and buses, and we started riding, and riding, and riding. We passed the strip. We went past the railroad tracks and we just looked at each other and said, “well, here we are, again,” you know? But when we saw the Moulin Rouge, it was so beautiful.
Then, we were thrilled, once we got in there.
WHITE (NARRATION): The Moulin Rouge was located just a few blocks outside of the predominantly Black West side. The hotel owners believed this would be the prime location for the first racially integrated hotel casino. It’s proximity to the West side brought opportunity and employment to the surrounding Black community.
BAILEY: They were just thrilled cause you’re putting something that they could be proud of to build up their neighborhood, and everything’s springing up then, more hotels, more businesses. Everybody was so optimistic. There was employment, cause I think they employed over 300 people or maybe more. Their uniforms were beautiful.
The service was just the best in town. I think that show was three o’clock in the morning, so that was a late show, and we’re the only ones in town that was doing it. So, all of the Strip would empty out, and they would all come over to the Moulin Rouge. And you’ve never seen so many stars, Tallulah Bankhead, and [Harry] Belafonte, and Sammy [Davis Jr.]. Just all the stars would hang out there.
And I really, in my heart, believed that’s why it was closed because we closed the standing room only. Because we had really just cleaned out the Strip, and they started doing the early shows. They still couldn’t have the flavor where we had over there.
WHITE (NARRATION): The original Moulin Rouge closed in October of 1955, after just five months. There were many rumors about why the seemingly successful hotel casino didn’t last, from unpaid contractors to location. But regardless of the reason, it was the community that was left to deal with the aftermath of losing a source of employment and business.
BAILEY: It was very, very sad because they just didn’t understand it, but gloom fell over the West side. That was really sad. All the building that was going up stopped. The Mardi Gras, there was going to be a mall, just stop, and that building stayed up for years half completed. Everything stopped when the Moulin Rouge closed. That’s what’s so sad about it. Just like the West side was just killed.
WHITE (NARRATION): In 1960, Black community leaders and organizers met with city and state officials at the Moulin Rouge to demand the integration of establishments downtown and on the Las Vegas strip. This was the first step in ending segregation in Las Vegas, as most hotel owners complied immediately, and all others following soon after.
While the closing of the Moulin Rouge did bring a great deal of sadness to the community, Bailey exaggerates the community’s response just a bit, as the West side did continue to grow along with the rest of Las Vegas and was by no means a ghost town. In the following years, the Moulin Rouge would reopen with a few different owners, including a Black owner in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
But, it was never the same after it closed in 1955. After a fire in 2009 destroyed most of the Moulin Rouge, the lot it once sat on is now mostly empty. In December, 2020, the site sold for $3.1 million to a newly formed Las Vegas-based company backed by an Australian investment firm. The area’s councilman is confident the new owners are committed to understanding the history of the property.
Bailey continued to dance in shows, both nationally and locally, after the closure of the Moulin Rouge in 1955. Her husband, Bob, went on to have a successful career in television. Not long after Bailey’s retirement from dancing, the Baileys started opening up businesses, and Anna became one of the first African-American women to hold a gaming license.
BAILEY: So, the girls went off and did wonderful jobs, and that’s what made me so proud. I went into business where I opened up a cocktail lounge, and then my last one was on Paradise and Sahara called The Baby Grand.
[Archival sounds of an announcer asking for an encore during a live performance]
So, I still had a lot of performers that would come and work for me, and a lot of the girls I used to dance with would come and work with me there.
We all either went into business or we went into management or something. We all did something with our lives. I think it was the background of being able to travel so far and meet so many different people on so many different walks of life.
[The sound of the crowd and wild jazz horns fades out]
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ORTIZ: …. Our next segment is an edited excerpt from Jordan Kisner’s podcast, Thresholds. A podcast that I really love. Everyone should listen to it.
DICKENSHEETS: And read her book.
ORTIZ: And read her book. It’s so good.
DICKENSHEETS: Thin Places, a collection of essays.
ORTIZ: Yes.
DICKENSHEETS: Highly recommend it.
ORTIZ: Jordan is a BMI Shearing Fellow and has been living in Las Vegas the first part of this year. During Jordan’s time in Vegas she’s gotten to connect with fellow writer and neighbor, BMI’s City of Asylum Shearing Fellow, Ahmed Naji. Ahmed became internationally known as a novelist when Using Life, his experimental dystopian novel about Cairo, got him arrested. The charge was, quote: “violating public modesty in Egypt,” where he is from. Apparently someone had experienced a sudden drop in blood pressure after reading a sex scene in the novel. These semantics lead to Ahmed becoming the first writer in modern Egyptian history to go to prison for a book he wrote. He eventually sought refuge in the United States, and he has been living and writing in Las Vegas since 2019.
DICKENSHEETS: Ahmed agreed to join Jordan on her Thresholds podcast to talk about how the experience of imprisonment — and then living in exile — particularly in exile in America — changed his feelings about writing and about his own identity.
ORTIZ: Here are Jordan Kisner and Ahmed Naji.
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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A WRITER IN EXILE?
[Inquisitive, upbeat music plays in the background]
JORDAN KISNER: I’ve been living in Las Vegas for the first part of this year as part of a fellowship with the Black Mountain Institute, and one of the highlights of this time has been getting to know, as a colleague and a neighbor, the writer, Ahmed Naji.
AHMED NAJI: I’ve been thinking about this podcast and about the interview for the last weeks, because what I noticed is that usually you ask a writer about a big event or a big thing that played a turning point in their life. I kept thinking, “what was the turning point in my life?” and I found there [are] a lot of turning points.
KISNER: Ahmed is a multi-hyphenate sort of artist. He’s been a journalist. He’s been a marketer. He’s worked in film, and he became internationally known as a writer of novels when a novel that he wrote, called Using Life, which is an experimental dystopian novel about Cairo, got him arrested on charges of quote, “violating public modesty in Egypt,” where he is from.
NAJI: The reality is I lived in Egypt most of my life. The last 10 or 12 years was full of turning points starting from the revolution, married and divorced twice, changing jobs, changing places, cities, going to jail. And it was like the whole 10 years was so intense and full of turning points. And, finally, the real turning point in my life is when I moved to Vegas two years ago. My life was full of change that I became adapted for this change. I adapted for this turning over and over.
KISNER: In prison, he received an outpouring of support from the international literary community. And once he was released, he came to the United States through a freedom to write fellowship through Penn America. After arriving in the United States, he and his wife, Yasmin, came to Las Vegas where they’ve been living since 2019, and where I met them.
NAJI: Before entering the prison, basically, in Cairo, in Egypt, you live day by day.
I wasn’t seeing myself as a writer, as a full dedicated writer, true literature writer. I thought of myself sometimes as a journalist, documentary filmmaker. I worked in the movie industry and production house, but, all the time, I was writing. I was writing secretly more to entertain myself. And it happened that, when I finish what I am writing, I will share it with close friends.
And they were the ones who thought, “well, this is great. You should publish it.” But, when I ended up at the prison because of my novel, now you are in the prison and you start to rethink your life and your choice, and you doubt what you are doing.
You start to ask yourself, “is it worth it?” I mean, “writing, is it worth it to be here in the prison for a year or more?” It took me a long journey inside prison to come to this conclusion: “well, it looks like I’m a writer and I have to deal with writing in a serious way.”
I went out of the prison and, two years after I fled Egypt, I arrived here. And again, I’m facing the same questions: “is it worth it? Do I continue as a writer? What does it mean to be a writer here in the United States and what does it mean to be a writer in exile?”
So, I’m facing all these questions.
KISNER: There’s a story you relate in the essay for the Believer about the rhinoceros as a person you knew in prison who was sort of instrumental, and I’m wondering if that was your encounter with him was an important part of that thinking, or if the moment of saying, “what is writing? Is it worth it? Should I really engage with it?” came elsewhere in prison?
NAJI: Yeah, so, for me, in the prison, I was in a prison because of my writing. I always thought I would end up in a prison at [some] time of my life.
In Egypt, you can’t predict, but, for sure, you will pass by the prison, but I didn’t [think] ever that I will end up in prison because of my literature writing. I thought it would be because of my political activism, for my journalist work, but suddenly, I was there for my novel.
Before that, I have been looking to myself, to my literature writing, to my fiction writing as: “I’m writing and I’m doing this work that for sure will not win any literature prize.” Okay? “For sure it will not be published by big publishing houses.” So, I always deal with it as, [a] kind of revolutionary artist practice. I know I experiment a lot. I’m writing a hard book that’s not easy to read. I don’t want a book to be easy to read. [I want] it to be evocative and to push people, to ask a question and rethink their life and their choices, and I know by doing this, I can’t depend on this as a source of income. So that’s why I had to do other stuff.
So that’s why I had to give more time of my life to other work that I really didn’t enjoy that much. I really didn’t think that it [had] any useful impact. I worked for a long time and I made a lot of money working at advertising and marketing, and, I think, it’s just bullshit jobs.
I was also, when I entered the prison, I was 30, going to be 30, 31. And, you know, like all those people saying 30 is a turning point in their life, “oh, I’m 30 now. So, I only have what another 30 years in life or 35 years in life? So, what am I going to do in those 30 years?” So, I was thinking and facing all those questions in prison.
KISNER: How did your relationship with writing change when you moved from Egypt to the United States and, by your own description, out of a period of your life that was very chaotic and full of change and into a period that was less so?
NAJI: As I was saying, life in Egypt is happening so fast, and it’s hard to predict anything. You always feel that you are running and, then, you come here and you feel that the rhythm is slow, a little bit, but the anxiety is more.
KISNER: Mm.
NAJI: The resistance or anxiety, you feel it around you.
Like, I always say how Egypt is a poor country, and people there are poor, but the problem here is that it’s not about that; there is poor here, but it’s about everyone is in debt.
Everyone is on credit cards and paying their education loans, their health insurance loans, and there is no social net. If you lost your job, you will lose everyone. This kind of anxiety is new for me. I’m trying to adapt.
So, now, as a writer, you are faced with questions. First, question about the language: “Should I continue writing in Arabic or should I focus on developing my English?”, and “what does it mean to continue writing in Arabic in a country that most people are speaking English or Spanish?”
And, second, you have questions about understanding your position in this new society and adapting to it.
KISNER: In this period of disorientation, as you described, and of adjustment, what are your hopes for who you are and will be as a writer and for what your writing might do?
NAJI: Now?
KISNER: Mhm.
NAJI: Literally, I don’t know.
KISNER: [Laughs]
NAJI: I don’t have an answer for this question. If you’re asking me this question in two years, I will be sure. I would give you three pages of answers. But now, my hope is first to understand my new position. I hope also to gain more confidence in my English.
I think I want to move [toward] writing in English, but I still have a long journey to do this.
I hope to find the key, to open up the English language for me. I hope I will be able, one day, to dream in English. I think if I started to dream in English, I’ll be able to write in it.
[Hopeful, acoustic music plays until fade out]
ORTIZ: ...The music in this segment is by Arthur Moon. To hear the full conversation with Ahmed Naji, search Jordan Kisner’s Thresholds podcast.
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ORTIZ: Sam Forbes is a writer, photographer, and actor -- but for many years a significant part of her creative practice took place inside what she called a hidden theater. While working as a dancer at a Las Vegas strip club, she wanted to be seen as an artist. But when she was showing her work in a gallery, she still wanted to be recognized as a stripper. She tells us about how she unified those two sides of herself in a segment we’re calling “Playing Friday.”
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PLAYING FRIDAY
[Sound of a horn and passing train is heard in the background]
SAM FORBES: A train hurtles down the tracks beside the club, so close the benches in the locker room shake.
I tie a black ribbon into a bow around my ankle and the back of my 7 ½ inch, Pleaser platform heels.
[Low, pulsing bass, reminiscent of club music, plays]
The Meisner Technique, developed by Sanford Meisner, is an approach to acting that focuses on an actor’s environment and the other actors in the scene more than internal thoughts and feelings.
Meisner said, “acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”
Friday, my stage name, is written on a yellow sticky note and taped to the wood laminate locker door.
I tuck a black leather clutch holding my phone and my money under my arm before I push open the swinging locker room doors and strut onto the club floor.
My insecurities fall away for the sake of the performance.
[Pulsing, uptempo electronic club music and crowd noises play in the background]
The air hits me like I’ve run into a wall I didn’t notice, warm and heavy with the smell of people, a crowd dancing and drinking. It’s a busy Friday night, my night, as the hosts and fellow dancers remind me.
“Excuse me,” I repeat, squeezing through the crowd of people waiting to get to the ATMs or the bathrooms that are directly outside of the locker room, pointing my hands like a shark fin as I weave through the cracks. I find a clear path and settle into my rhythm; my heels strike the blue confetti carpet in time to the music; the muscles of my core tighten and swivel as I flow down the aisle past parties of 4-10 people with bottles of Belvedere, carafes of cranberry juice, orange juice, bottles of Veuve Clicquot, Hennessy, champagne buckets full of ice with silver ice scoops on top that are too small to hold more than four cubes at a time.
Sapphire is written in flashing lights amongst a false night sky that blankets the top half of the back wall.
I imagine myself, my energy, filling every corner of this large space, an old gym with 50 ft tall ceilings. “The Largest Strip Club in the World!” Sapphire proclaims in all the ads.
[Low, pulsing bass, reminiscent of club music, plays]
A lap is one circle of the club where I evaluate my options: who do I want to perform for?
I walk through the Martini 1 bar, named for the 20ft illuminated martini glass mounted behind it, and Peter’s bar, the back bar, also only open when it’s busier, named for the club owner, then around the side hallways to see if someone is lingering there, away from a table or party.
Who is angry? Who is bored? Who is eager? Who is watching me? Who do I want to talk to? Who am I interested in? The most important question: where is the spark?
[Daft Punk-like electronic music swells]
Directors cast based on the spark, lining up potential lead actors during call backs, to face each other, stare at each other, for longer than is comfortable. They are looking for chemistry. I am looking for chemistry. I want someone who wants to be in a scene with me, who wants to act, to play with me. I want the spark.
[Soft, inquisitive music plays in the background]
I’ve spotted him sitting at a candlelit table in a low-backed, blue upholstered chair on wheels, easily rolled from one table to another, easily toppled by a vigorous lap dance. He looks at me, longer than he meant to, before looking away. He shifts his weight in his chair, crosses his legs, tries to focus on the conversation with his friend, but he glances back at me quickly, one more look.
I turn from the aisle and walk between the tables until I reach him. I smile warmly, lean over, my hand on the back of his chair.
He blushes a little, eyes wide. I sit on his thigh, my legs crossed and touching the floor between his legs, my arm around his shoulders, my black leather purse tucked into the back of the seat, where no one walking past can grab it.
The most basic Meisner exercises consist of two people sitting across from each other having an interaction based on what is in front of them, this moment.
Of course, there is a script; everyone is working from some kind of script, even in real life. But, before the script, underneath the script, what is the truth in this moment?
I look at the person in front of me, I really look at them. I feel their emotions, the tension in their body, how they look around the room. I look for the details.
As I first practiced in acting class in college, I say what I see.
Maybe he repeats what I say, noticing my blue eyes, or he notices something else about me.
[Laughing]
I smile and squish my curls.
I look at his jacket and touch the silk pocket square, folded neatly in his pocket.
[Inquisitive music plays for an extended break. The sound of two people laughing is heard in the background]
We both laugh a little nervously, but here we are, grounding ourselves in this moment.
When he consents to me sitting down and responds to my observations with observations, he has begun to play this scene with me, actor and audience.
We are going to continue to talk: questions, stories, like most conversations, but now our interaction is grounded in our bodies, and where we really are.
For someone to play a scene with me, they must also behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances. They don’t have to, of course. Anyone can revoke consent at any time by refusing to answer, by changing their energy to something that is closed off, by telling me to have a good night, or that they’re not interested.
“Yes” means nothing without the freedom to say “no”.
[Upbeat dance music, like that found in Dance Dance Revolution, plays in the background]
After years of dancing, I sense how close I am to the end of the song. Right before it changes, I ask.
Are you ready?
[Electronic music fades into dream-like music]
Dance begins with breath, from deep within my diaphragm, breathe in, breathe out. When any motion is filled with air, it becomes a dance.
[The sound of someone taking deep breaths in and out]
In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.
Next, connection, between the music and me and him. He is my audience of one, one inch from my face.
I touch him.
I am liquid. I am light.
I shine through him and lift him out of the darkness. I see him. Maybe he sees me. For a song, we understand each other.
[Music fades out]
The most common question a stripper is asked is, “what’s your real job?”, or “What else do you do?”
“I’m an artist,” is how I answer that question in the club. It is the most honest answer for who I am and what I do that covers dancing, theater, photography, writing, illustration.
I pull my phone out of my leather clutch, load my Instagram page, and show guests the drawing I did last week, my film photography, my violin playing.
The first people to buy my art were guests I met at Sapphire who contacted me later asking for an illustration.
It wasn’t until my show at the Lost City Museum in Overton, NV, that I got the question, “what else do you do?”, by an artist in the show with me.
I tell her I’d studied drama with an emphasis on acting and directing. But that, in my ten years living in Vegas, I’d been stripping, mostly at Sapphire.
Then she asks the second most common question I am asked at the strip club, “what made you choose to be a stripper?”
[Pensive, laser-like electronic music is heard in the background]
So, I tell her that I read somewhere that Americans spend more money in strip clubs than any form of live theater combined. After I finished my degree, I wanted more practice time in front of a live audience. I wanted to have more of a foundation of real people and lives from which to inform my acting. I spent four years listening to professors and classmates debate whether or not theater was dead and I wondered: how can theater be dead, if strip clubs, a form of theater, are booming? It made me think about what forms of theater aren’t recognized by the theater establishment.
[Music becomes rhythmic and hip hop-ish]
In every acting class, every audition, actors are encouraged to make different choices. It doesn’t matter what the choice is, only that it’s not the same choice everyone else makes. I saw strip clubs as a new Vaudeville, a place to work an act, over and over, with as many people as I wanted, a place where I also had the freedom to create the kind of character and performance I imagined, something that was constantly evolving, changing, based on my experiences.
I was worried someone would ask the same questions at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery in Las Vegas when I showed my stereoscopic street photography. I was prepared to say, “I’m a stripper,” but no one did.
For months before the show, I took early morning and late-night walks around my favorite part of the city, from the Arts District over to East Fremont, with a View-Master or Stereo Realist Camera loaded with Ektachrome or Velvia film.
I am looking for sparks there too, the spark of a story, a moment, that most people don’t notice.
[Resonating of Tibetan singing bowls and chimes is heard in the background]
Human eyes are stereoscopic. Each views a slightly different angle of reality. The brain combines the left and right image into a single three-dimensional perception.
When two photographs are taken by a camera with lenses the same distance apart as human eyes, they appear three-dimensional, when viewed together.
That’s the thing about stereoscopic photography: like a lap dance, it too must be appreciated on a personal level—only one person at a time can look into a View-Master. It’s inside of our own minds that the image becomes three-dimensional.
[Upbeat dance music, like that found in Dance Dance Revolution, plays in the background]
After years of dancing, I sense how close I am to the end of the song.
Playing Friday, I learn and grow as an artist even more than I hope for, but it is time to apply my experiences to a different set of imaginary circumstances.
[Sound of a crowd joins music]
But how do I express a complete picture of myself?
This has always been my conflict as a dancer: I am hyper-exposed, naked, seen by thousands of people every year, but when I leave the club, in many ways, I don’t exist.
It’s inside of the audience’s mind that Sam the artist and Friday the stripper merge into a single three-dimensional image.
With each lap dance, conversation, connection, people have an opportunity to see my dimensions—exploring the intersections of art and sexuality, and each person chooses whether to see the truth in these imaginary circumstances.
[Chimes are heard over electronic music until fade-out]
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ORTIZ: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Black Mountain Radio. Black Mountain Radio is broadcast from Southern Paiute land.
DICKENSHEETS: Black Mountain Radio is an audio project of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Sara Ortiz is the host and curator.
ORTIZ: And today’s fantastic guest host is Scott Dickensheets.
Our senior producer is Nicole Kelly. Vera Blossom and Layla Muhammad are our associate producers. Scott Dickenshetts is our editor. Anthony Farris is our production assistant. Fil Corbitt is our sound mixer. Art by Jesse Zhang; our theme song is by Jeremy Klewicki; and graphic design by Lille Allen.
DICKENSHEETS: Special thanks to Anna Bailey, Sam Forbes, Brent Holmes, Jordan Kisner, Arthur Moon, Ahmed Naji, Claytee White, and Lela Walker and her sons Darion and Anthony.
ORTIZ: Thanks to the rest of the team at the Black Mountain Institute: Kellen Braddock, Daniel Gumbiner, Haley Patail, Kristen Radtke, Summer Thomad, Michael Ursell, and Haya Wang.
ORTIZ: Black Mountain Radio is supported by the Rogers Foundation and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Big thanks to our sponsors at Zappos who helped make this episode possible and who contribute to Las Vegas’s creative communities. A special shoutout to our KUNV engineer Kevin Krall.
ORTIZ: Our deep gratitude goes to Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting Black Mountain Radio.
ORTIZ: Big thanks to our sponsors at Zappos who helped make this episode possible and who contribute to Las Vegas’s creative communities. A special shoutout to our KUNV engineer Kevin Krall.
DICKENSHEETS: So we can come back on air soon, please consider supporting this project and all we do as a Friend of the Black Mountain Institute. We welcome volunteers and advice, and urge anyone who is able to go to blackmountaininstitute.org, and make a donation of $10 a month. In addition to a heavy fallout of cosmic gratitude, you’ll get a subscription to The Believer, a thank you in its pages, and other tokens of our appreciation.
Learn more at blackmountainradio.org
ORTIZ: Thanks for listening.
DICKENSHEETS: Thank you, Sara.
ORTIZ: Thank you, Scott!