Namak Magazine - Robert Karimi

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2 DJs and a Storyteller
by Behzad Tabatabai and Teresa Camacho
Photos by Chuck Przybyl
Namak Magazine, March 2005 - pg. 38

House and punk rock beats mix in the background with 70s disco and 80s hip hop as Chicago-based performance artist, Robert Karimi, begins telling his audience war stories.

They may not sound like war stories, but they are. Karimi’s tales center around the daily battle between
self-definition and being labeled by society. His autobiographical front-line accounts of growing up in a mixed-culture home, and the responses he encounters when he tells people he is Iranian-Guatemalan, are not just entertaining, they teach us to assess how we perceive ourselves and others.

Robert Karimi is an interdisciplinary artist. The son of a Guatemalan mother and an Iranian father, he has has spent his career pointing out that through embracing our own Otherness we can reach an understanding of the world around us. Karimi’s work is a tapestry of American, Iranian and Latin-American cultures. He weaves Islam and Catholicism with other worlds—Chicano politics, the hip-hop and DJ cultures, and the spoken word scene. He is a poet, spoken word artist, playwright, curator, educator, graphic artist, producer, director, journalist and chef. But ask him what he likes to be called and he smirks. He knows he is not easily classifiable, not ethnically, nor artistically.

Karimi asks, “what do you think I am? Whatever it is, you’re right.” He clearly enjoys engaging in dialog about identity issues and baits people into conversations on the subject. He says that “our biological identity is just a point of departure. We’re constantly negotiating ‘self’ in this country.” Karimi describes this perpetual redefinition of identity as having a “sample consciousness”. We draw on so many sources it’s difficult to identify with just one. “Look at Iranians,” he explains, “they’re taking the pieces of what they are, to create who they are. I learned it from my parents because that’s what they did to survive. Hip hop provided me with a metaphor to describe my experience.”

That metaphor is the DJ technique of sampling music and remixing it to create new sounds. In his show, Self: the remix, Karimi is flanked on stage by DJs D Double and Franco de Leon, who play music from his childhood while he describes what it was like growing up with multiple identities. As they sample music to create the show’s soundtrack, he samples his memories to create the show’s message.

For the audience, the show is entertaining and thought-provoking. For Karimi himself, it’s cathartic on one level and frustrating on another. He vents: “I’m really pissed off that we’re talking about culture in essentialist ways still.” To Karimi, the essentialist view is outdated. It’s not exactly stereotyping, but it is an attempt to create an “objective” view of culture. “It’s about how ‘down’ you are. It’s creating a boundary for who is in the club.” Karimi says. He adds,

“I’m against the Iranian kid who tells me I’m not Iranian enough. And I’m against the guy who doesn’t want to be my friend because I’m Iranian. The show is built to address both groups, to say hey, we need to think about how we view ourselves.” Karimi is happy to do the show but would have preferred that it wasn’t necessary.
Self: the remix recently won the Chicago Critics’ Choice Award. It has been running, in various forms, since 1997 and Karimi will continue performing it as long as he is physically able, though he says, “I’d like to come to a day when some kid who is dealing with these issues is doing it as a play.” For now, audiences can enjoy the show in the author’s own voice.

While Self: the remix is mostly about how Karimi had to hide being Iranian to survive, his other current show tackles the issue head on. Blindfolded: The Iranian Hostage Crisis, 9/11 and The Way We Don’t See is a remarkable piece of experimental theater. Created in collaboration with Chicago’s Freestreet Theater Company, noted for their use of non-linear theater with kids, Blindfolded is an educational experience for both the performers (all high school students) and the audience. The show is really a history and performance workshop. Karimi explains that “on the first day of the project none of the kids knew about the Iranian Hostage Crisis. By the end they were teaching it to the audience.”

Blindfolded was conceived when Karimi realized his students did not know what the Iranian Hostage Crisis was. He was shocked. He says, “our history is already being rewritten and we’re not even dead yet! That’s like if 25 years from now no one knew about 9/11! Wouldn’t that be scary?” So he decided to use Agusto Bali Theater of the Oppressed techniques to get the kids to “deal with their own stereotypical view of the world, to see how they see the world, and how the hostage crisis effects their view.”

He asked them to interview family and friends about the historical event. Not one student reported finding out anything significant. “We’re talking about people who are 29 to 50 years old,” Karimi said, “they were all foggy about it.” He next had the kids perform role-playing exercises such as exploring how a terrorist wakes up in the morning. The trick was to keep the students engaged. They then did a “Mad Write”, a Freestreet Theater technique of frenetic free association. Finally, the show was developed and performed. Each night the performers involved the audience by asking them what historical event they would never forget. Karimi says he cried as people shared their personal stories, particularly one night when the conversation focused on the Japanese internment experience during WWII. Blindfolded won the Towner Award for the most innovative approach to the humanities in Illinois. It will run for 20 weeks.

But awards and recognition are not what drive Robert Karimi’s creative work. He has his share of both. His true motivation is educating, performing and working for social change. His first forays into writing included a poem, Piñata, that deals with the plight of many Latin women–domestic violence. The poem is simple yet powerful in its imagery, and could be used across different communities to draw attention to the issue and spur people to become involved. As a body of work, Karimi’s poetry is structurally complex and elegant in style. As a result, he was featured on the fourth season of the HBO show, Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, where he performed a shortened version of his seminal poem, Get Down With Your Catholic-Muslim Self.

Get Down, is one Karimi’s most popular poems. He has performed it to audiences across the United States. Edgy and controversial in its depiction of Catholic rituals and icons, the poem ends with Karimi’s standard admonition that the listener should “get down with yourself,” no matter what that “self” may be, no matter how the listener may have sampled his or her own consciousness.

For more info visit www.kaoticgood.com.