You will enter as you are.
Either knowing or waiting to be discovered.
Apathy is not welcome here. We know. You will be asked to hand me your dears, personally. Then, take your dreams. Though, not from me. Only you know where to find them.
Then, hold them. Embrace them. Because your lives are my responsibility for those hours you spend in my world. A world where dreamers are awake and leaders are righteous.
And it is my promise that I will not fail you. For what you are becoming is who you were undiscovered. I know that. And I will speak to that person. To live eternally in the pages of history books, to leave a lasting legacy is not an easy matter. But when you leave, gripping greatness under your palms, a fire in your heart, you will realized that you must accept your destiny as only being great, as what you will accomplish as only being done with excellence. I, also, promise not to give you your fears back. They are where they belong: far and irretrievable. As they should be.

After many months in solitary study and contemplation, the question that struck me most was: would I die for what I am living for right now? And as an active spoken word poet in Ottawa, this issue was the topic of most of my poems. In reality, poetry was a spiritual journey that I used in order to sort out the internal dialogue that I had been battling for years. In one of my poems, there is a line that best captures the essence of what I want to relay to you in this piece: “Go live because your existence has never been enough".

Equipped with both my courage, faith in God, my need to do something important that would move others to action and my audacity to create something that has never been see in Ottawa before, as an artist, I have set out to create a one of a kind showcase of international activists from diverse fields fused through spoken word and film. I want to create an event that fuses spoken word and film to produce a unique show that serves as political and social commentary on the world we live in.

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do."-Rumi

And as the author of the Alchemist, Paulo Coelho, put it, “Don't let your lives become, ‘quiet Sunday afternoons’”, without much disruption, excitement, unpredictability or challenge. We really don't have much time to accomplish what we want unless we start right now.

As Muslims, we can marvel at the glorious past history but we are facing the difficulty in moving forward and creating our legacy in the time we live in. When we look back at our time, what are we going to be known for? What are you going to be known for? 

We have forgotten the rich legacy of Islamic art and are failing to produce create and contribute something to the world by way of this field. As Muslims, we can marvel at the glorious past history but we are facing the difficulty in moving forward and creating our legacy in the time we live in. When we look back at our time, what are we going to be known for? What are you going to be known for? Honestly, as long as we think mediocre, we will be mediocre.

I'm not just creating a socially-conscious event for the sake of social-consciousness or for the sake of creating an event; I'm doing this as a step to push Muslims forward in the field of artistic social-activism. By reviving Muslim diverse history legacy in the arts and adapting a new and more modern approach to using art as a way of lifting the consciousness of the people, we can make a real impact on how Muslims are seen.

From this, I want you to dream. I want you to tap into that potential that was given to you by God to be the change you want to see in the world. You can achieve whatever it is you want to go after. Changing the world isn't an external labor as one may think. The state of our world reflects the state of our souls. Change that and the world will change. Freedom comes after truly being able to fulfill your purpose. And with that I invite you to:

The Dream by Hodan Ibrahim on October 30^th 2010 at the National Art Gallery. Tickets will go on sale in August

For full details please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it