Magan Wiles, Outrider

Friday 2 February 2007

This week at Saint Louis University, it was Palestine Awareness Week, thanks to the creative and tireless labors of SLU Solidarity with Palestine. This evening was the first performance of Magan Wiles’ a beautiful resistance: confessions of a human rights hoosier in palestine. Joined by Sara Wall, Magan used photos, recitation, music, chant, anecdote, and dialogue to tell of her three months last year in Palestine. I hope she does it again, but in all likelihood, the work will evolve as a project ever in progress and process. About 100 people showed up at Carlo Auditorium in Tegeler Hall to be mesmerized by this dramatic, funny, and heart-breaking piece de resistance.

I recently read a book of interviews and manifestos by poet Anne Waldman, called Outrider. In one passage, Waldman writes about the “Outrider,” which makes me think immediately of Magan and what she does in a beautiful resistance:”The OUTRIDER holds a premise of imaginative consciousness. The OUTRIDER rides the edge—parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the mainstream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream, whether it recognizes its existence or not. It cannot be co-opted, it cannot be bought. Or rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of ‘negative capability,’ but also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands that it intervene on the culture. This is not about being an Outsider. The OUTRIDER might be an outlaw, but not an outsider. Rather, the OUTRIDER is a kind of shaman, the true spiritual “insider.” The shaman travels to zones of light and shadow. The shaman travels to edges of madness and death and comes back to tell the stories.”

Indeed, Magan told us such stories about her dear friend Fayrouz in Balata Refugee Camp and her own struggles back in the United States of Amnesia.

After seeing the performance, a former student in tears came up to me, saying “I didn’t know, I should have known, what can I do?”

With this 50 minute performance about her travel to those “zones of light and shadow,” Magan changed this young woman’s life.

And once again changed mine.