Artist Interview with Alok: On Laughter as Medicine, Creating Space for Grief and Working towards Cultural Transformation

© Alok

A few days before their comedy show at Den Atelier on 11th May, déi aner had the honour of interviewing the internationally acclaimed poet, comedian and actor Alok, who is currently on their Europe tour. Like many people before – and undoubtedly, after – us, we felt touched and inspired by Alok’s wisdom and humour, but above all by their profound humanity. What they shared with us were thoughts that were filled with political urgency as much as they were filled with poetry.

What do you know about Luxembourg?

To be honest, not that much…and I think that's part of why I wanted to go. I feel like I’ve heard kind of one-dimensional stories like ‘ohh this is just a boring, fly-over place’. There's all these kinds of dismissive narratives that I've heard. That it’s privileged, and not really on the vanguard of politics…and every time I hear those kinds of narratives I get suspicious, because I grew up in a place where people called ‘fly-over’, and not the center.

I’m always interested in where people draw what the center and what the margin is. I think every place is complex and beautiful and urgent and contradictory. And so I wanted to just go and learn and explore more. So for years I've been telling my team : ‘Can we go to Luxembourg? Can we go to Luxembourg?’ And they just said ‘it's really hard, we don't really send that many artists there’. And I was like that's precisely why we need to make this work. So I'm excited to go and learn more. 

Can you talk a bit about your upcoming comedy show? What do you try to bring to the cities that you're touring?

Sure! This comedy show is called ‘Hairy Situation’ and I wrote it in response to the escalating climate of transphobia all across the world, where…in so many ways, I feel like trans and nonbinary people, we've been recruited into so many narratives that have nothing to do with us.

It was traumatizing for me to see the erosion of trans rights over the past few years because I do think there's been a repealing and a set-back. And I felt really traumatized and scared by that. And so I make jokes about scary things to be able to find the stamina and wherewithal to keep going. So for me, stand-up is a practical word. How do I stand back up in a world that degrades me? What joke do I need to tell that gives me the strength and the conviction and the courage to keep on pushing through? So what I've started to understand is as things get more dire and serious, I feel this deep need to get more silly and ridiculous, because that helps me stay afloat. And when we're laughing, we take up more space. We're bigger, we're in movement. So when we’re silly, we can't be held hostage by all these stereotypes about us.

© Alok

I noticed that a lot of my community across the world was suffering from debilitating depression, loneliness, and fear. I wanted to create a sanctuary where we could just laugh and release. And I really believe that comedy is medicinal. I think it's very healing. And what's been unfortunate is that often the traditional comedy scene is so virulently sexist and transphobic that many women and trans people don't feel safe in those spaces. And so what I wanted to do is to create a space where queers and feminists could come and have a good time and relax and like…ease tension. 

And as I started on this tour, I really began to stumble on this phrase I've been saying every night, which is: joy is our birthright. For so long, I felt like I had to be something different, someone different. Like joy wasn't available to me, and I just had to deal with misery as my assignment on earth. And what this show has really helped me argue is that I don't just want the end of discrimination, the end of villains, the end of persecution. I want the creation of a kind of active joy, where trans and nonbinary people just get to chill and relax. I know that there'll be real substantial progress when we don't feel guilty about our laughter. 

So, would you say your comedy is a means to get over so-called activist burnout or just burnout in general with what the world is going through right now?

I think that’s part of it for sure. I think I’ve got to a place in my own life where I was so fluent with everything that was wrong. I was able to deconstruct everything that was wrong. And I wanted to spend more time paying attention to what is right. The truth is that being trans, being queer is one of the greatest gifts of my life. 

And humor has been really integral to queer and trans communities for self-celebrating in a world that degrades us. A lot of my humor is indebted to a tradition called ‘camp’. And camp is so important to me because what camp is saying is like ‘OK, you can throw me in the trash, but I’m gonna find next season’s accessories here. You can spit on me in the street, but thank you so much for this sickening highlight!’ It's a way of not being fazed by all the attempts to bring us down and make us small. So I just feel like it's really powerful, spiritually and energetically - as a queer person to learn how to crack a joke.

In your opinion, what is the core issue with countries like Luxembourg that are very wealthy and often highly individualistic?

© Ryan Prince

You know, one of the greatest joys of my work is that I get to travel the world and I get to perform in places all across the world. And oftentimes when people say to me like ‘ohh wow why are you performing in insert third world country in the Global South? And I'm like OK…we really have to challenge this colonial mindset that just because people don't have access to resources, they don't have a kind of spiritual wealth. And what I found is that in a lot of so-called rich countries, there's actually a lot of depression, a lot of loneliness, a lot of spiritual angst. And in a lot of so-called ‘poor’ countries, there's actually such deep community, intimacy. And that's not to say that resources don’t matter. But it is to say that there's a deeper emotional and spiritual plane that I think is lost when we use these very narrow ideas of development as our framework.

And so what I found, especially performing in places like Europe, like Luxembourg, is that actually the root cause of a lot of these political systems is loneliness and spiritual alienation. And what I try to suggest in my work is that if we continue to believe in the myth of individualism – which is really a ghost story, it's a horror story – we are inevitably going to create loneliness. Because the truth is we are all responsible and connected to one another. I believe that strangers are just potential friends. 

One of the most powerful things that we can do is to look at the people who we’re taught are other or different to us and actually say: no, this is just an extension of me. Or a part of me that I haven't had the opportunity to meet yet. And part of why I feel like comedy is a great way to illustrate this is that there's something that happens instinctually in our bodies when we see other people laugh next to us. Our bodies are kind of more empathetic than our minds often are. They're deeply tuned into one another. And there's something very special that happens when an individual can be part of a crowd. And the laughter kind of reminds us that we're part of a crowd, we’re part of something greater than ourselves.  

© Alok

What are your thoughts on the intersection between queer struggles and resistance to settler colonialism ?

It's impossible to separate homophobia and transphobia from colonialism and racism, because so much of what the project of racism was and is is institutionalizing the Western gender binary and Western gender norms all across the world. And annihilating all of the other indigenous ways of practicing gender. 

So, for example, I'm from a place called India, where we have thousands of years of affirming and recognizing genders outside of the binary. But it was only when the British came that we were criminalized for being otherwise, and the explicit goal of the colonial project was to disappear and erase non-Western forms of gender. And so now what happens is that oftentimes people will say that being gay or trans is a Western import, when in fact what is the Western import is homophobia and transphobia. So for us as racialized people, we can really see how the intersection of race, sexuality, and gender is our lived experience.

I think what is difficult is that a lot of white Europeans who are distant from the so-called colonies don't think that race is pertinent to them. But the truth is that intersectionality is not just that race matters whenever there's a brown person present - race is also operating when whiteness is present. So a lot of what people describe and understand as LGBTQ rights is actually specifically the issues facing white, cis wealthy people, and then that gets universalized to the entire world. There are many more queer issues than those that usually get enlisted as queer issues, like marriage or adoption rights. Those things are important, but if that's the only narrow view of what you see as the terrain of the queer struggle, that's gonna inherently privilege a small subset of the community. But what I’m also frustrated by sometimes in these conversations is that it’s seen as a courtesy to care about issues facing other people, and we reinscribe this idea of ‘these are my issues and those are your issues’.  What I’m trying to say in my work is that it's not actually true freedom unless everybody's free. I don't wanna live in a world where anyone is suffering or where anyone is miserable. So the victories won by the gay movement are not true victories because they haven't actually mapped out onto the experiences of all queer people. It’s a malnourished version of equality because true equality would mean everyone everywhere would be able to experience these freedoms.

Do you have any words of advice for activists and community organizers in Luxembourg?

First, I want to affirm the pain. I feel like one of the most toxic things we have is we don't create spaces for people to just be hurt, be sad, be uncomfortable, be in pain. So much of the Western project is allergic to pain.  There’s a kind of compulsory masking where everyone has to pretend that they are better than they are, even if people are really suffering. And it's profoundly invulnerable.

So I think the first thing is to create a space where people can actually feel seen in their pain and express grief. That’s political. It might not look political, but it is actually really political. To create a sanctuary where people can actually be full humans. And what it means to be human is for people to actually feel.  And oftentimes, the experience of living in countries like Luxembourg is not being able to truly exercise the fullest extent of your feelings. To always have abbreviated pain, abbreviated sadness. And when we abbreviate our sadness, in fact, that has the impact of abbreviating our joy. Because when we have to close ourselves to numb ourselves to pain, that also numbs ourselves to joy and to all the good parts of life. So I think the first step is to really create a space for people to heal. Healing comes from being honest and from taking real emotional inventory of how we feel. Healing can only happen collectively. It’s not enough to be in our silos. We actually have to come together and witness in the flesh that other people experience the same grief as us. 

© Ted Eytan

And then the second thing is once we bring people together with pain – because pain can be a portal to intimacy and connection – we can start to heal. In my life, loneliness has been one of the best catalysts. Because I felt lonely, I went out seeking other people who felt the same flavor of lonely. And then I found my friends. And that’s where the most powerful work starts…when you find other people who feel the same version of pain. And then you start dreaming together of ‘how can I create a world where I can actually have something that’s the opposite of this ?’ And then I would caution people to not obsess over scale. Everything starts small. Everything begins as an idea. Everything begins as something invisible. Even if it might seem minute, even if it might seem insignificant, there’s something very powerful about 2 people, about 5 people, about 7 people coming together in a room.  And once you start to feel proud of that, then that’s how you begin to build and grow. It’s because people actually realize that ‘oh, this alternative that we’ve been seeking for our entire lives is here.’ It doesn’t have to be this super shiny, super sheen thing. It can be something that starts very small and grassroots, and then it becomes contagious in that way. 

And the final thing I’ll stress is the importance of art in all of this. I notice that in social movements across the world, people are very fluid in the language of policy and law. But the truth that we can learn from states like Luxembourg is that even if we have so-called human rights, that doesn’t end human loneliness. And we have to recalibrate that what we’re fighting for is not just legal recognition – and I think this is especially the case for trans and nonbinary people – we’re fighting for cultural transformation. 

You know, I come from a country where the trans movement very much prioritized legal frameworks. And now all of those rights are being rolled back. We didn’t really value our culture workers and our artists, who understood that it’s about changing hearts. We need to create spaces for people to be artists. That looks like showing up for one another in our community when we’re doing art. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of people love to critique what’s wrong with the world, but then when you have artists who are actually trying to create something different, it’s hard to get support from your own community.

And I think that’s because we’ve been trained by algorithms to think that the only way that there’s urgency is when there’s critique, or when there’s crisis, or when there’s fear. But the slow energy – the kind of amorphous, becoming energy – that is created when someone’s designing a fashion collection that’s gender-affirming, or creating a feminist zine, or putting on a poetry night. That energy doesn’t want the same attention and clicks, and we’ve got to start romanticizing it, valorizing it, uplifting it. Because that’s the kind of positive, generative energy that can change things. When we just situate ourselves in critique, that can lead to the activism burnout that you mentioned before. We have to have a kind of creative energy that uplifts us alongside it.