The Jadeed Voices Initiative is a special project by the Muslim Writers Collective which offers a platform to reflect on our faith and the diversity among us by highlighting the exigency of promoting nuanced, multifaceted perspectives. We will be sharing one narrative a day from July 8-19. For more information about this initiative, please visit our author page, and follow the Muslim Writers Collective on Facebook and Twitter.
There we were, sitting in my old high school auditorium, literally at the edge of our seats as the lights went down.
"Lights up on Washington Heights, up at the break of day..."
The opening number of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights rang across that quiet, dark auditorium. The entire audience was silent as they absorbed every aspect of the stage. The entire audience save for two. My older brother sat next to me, our bodies moving effortlessly to the blended sounds of In the Heights -- Latin music, hip-hop, and rap. We recited along to every line nearly as perfectly as our youngest brother, Muhammad, who was on stage as the leading role of Usnavi.
"I am Usnavi and you prob'ly never heard my name/
Reports of my fame are greatly exaggerated/
Exacerbated by the fact that my syntax/
Is highly complicated cuz I emigrated/
From the single greatest little place in the Caribbean/
Dominican Republic/"
This play was made for someone like Muhammad. He grew up on the southwest side of Houston where he spent his afternoons rap battling people at parking lots. His rapid command of rhythm and rhyme fit flawlessly to the character of Usnavi. But as I sat with my older brother, Abdullah, in the audience, I knew this play went beyond that stage...In the Heights touched our hearts in a way that only storytelling could. Throughout the play, Usnavi struggles with his identity as he tries to wrap around the paradox of being an immigrant living in America. By all accounts, he is a foreigner...yet by those same accounts, he is American. For Usnavi, the question of where is "home" transcends the limitations of physical tangibility. No, the question of "home" is a question that yearns for culture, for roots, for family.
As I sat in the audience that night, I knew that my brothers and I were the only people in the room who understood how amazing it was that someone had grabbed our emotions, our thoughts, our lives and put them into song after song after song. Just like Usnavi, we struggled with our identities. We struggled with what it means to be an immigrant. We struggled with what it means to be a minority. We struggled with what it means to be a minority within minorities. We were Muslim-Indonesian-Americans living in a city whose Muslim populations were predominantly Arabs or Desis. We didn't belong to any specific community: not among our schoolmates, not among our faith group, not among our city. For us, "home" transcended the limitations of physical tangibility. Seeing my baby brother as Usnavi was witnessing a manifestation of our internal battles. Muhammad would later win a Tommy Tune Best Actor award, Houston's highest distinction for high school actors. His Tommy Tune would then take him to the National High School Musical Theatre Awards (The Jimmy Awards). At the Jimmy Awards, Muhammad would then win the Spirit of the Jimmy Award by unanimous decision. For now, however, it became time for Abdullah and me to ball our fists while pushing back tears as Nina Rosario's song played.
"When I was a child I stayed wide awake/
Climbed to the highest place/
On every fire escape/
Restless to climb/
I got every scholarship/
Saved every dollar/
The first to go to college/
How do I tell them why/
I'm coming back home?/
With my eyes on the horizon./"
Failure. Poverty. Shame. This play was showing us the hardships of our lives. I am the first in my family to attend an American university. I lost my scholarship within a semester of college. I, too, made it out of a life of continued struggle and failed. I cried. My older brother next to me grabbed my head. Not long after this, he too experienced the reality seeping through the stage lights when Kevin Rosario (Nina's father) held his emotional solo.
"Today my daughter's home and I am useless.../
I will not be the reason/
That my family can't succeed/
I will do what it takes/
They'll have everything they need/
Or all my work, all my life/
Everything I've sacrificed will have been useless/"
Helplessness. Circumstances. Inadequacies. This was our family. We were watching the downfall that came with daring to dream. How many families had watched these scenes through tear-soaked faces? What uncertainties had those families seen within these scenes? How many parents saw themselves in Kevin Rosario, or how many Nina's were there in the audience? The only thing that was certain that night was the impact Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights had on my brothers and me. We listened to our own cries within those melodies - children of immigrants who wanted nothing more but to live up to the legacy that our parents had so graciously laid out for us. We saw our own memories of years of struggle embedded in the choreography of that stage. We were failures. We were helpless. But that was no longer who we wanted to be. That night my brothers and I understood what it meant to work towards a legacy.
Lin-Manuel Miranda went from producer to producer trying to make his In the Heights story come to life. Rejection after rejection, Miranda kept true to the story he wanted to tell. He recalls the encounter he had with a "really big deal producer" who felt it necessary to add more "high stakes" to Nina's story. "Perhaps she could come back home pregnant," the producer had said. It seemed losing a scholarship wasn't "high stakes" enough. However, Miranda rejected this producer's offer to bring his musical to fruition. Miranda knew what type of story he wanted to tell; he felt no need to compromise his show for the sake of getting ahead, or in actuality, for the sake of securing more money. Barely out of college, Miranda could have easily allowed his story to be altered, so he could begin reaping the benefits of a "high stakes" production. But that was not how Lin-Manuel Miranda wanted his legacy to be. That was not the story he wanted to tell.
Proper, quality storytelling allowed for my brothers and I, men of Asian descent, to feel as if a story like In the Heights, a story heavily rooted in Latino culture, belonged to us. Similarly, there are stories within the Muslim communities that also leave a tremendous level of impact within the hearts of those who experience them. Lin-Manuel Miranda held on to an incredible amount of urgency when telling the stories he told. Imagine how we, as a Muslim community, can change the course of a nation if we mixed Miranda's sense of urgency with our own unaltered stories and personal conviction.
Iman Yunus is a current Mechanical Engineering student attending the University of Houston. He considers writing to be art in the rawest of forms; he firmly believes engineers have to appreciate the arts in order to grasp the full extent of the sciences. Iman is also a blog writer and spoken word poet.