Deaf punk poet and filmaker Sabina England on punk culture and her experience and relationship with it

Sabina England talks about a lot more than just punk rock in this interview, and I recommend reading it. Quite fascinating. But for the sake of my research, I only included what she said about punk rock and punk culture here.

Deaf Punk Playwright/Poet, Sabina England, Lets it Loose!

Krip-Hop Nation (KHN) - Hello I’m so glad you said yes to an interview!  First of all your work is beautiful.  Tell us you call yourself a Deaf Muslim Punk Playwright please explains.

Sabina England - ...Anyway, just so we are clear, I didn’t originally call myself a Deaf Muslim Punk Playwright. A Pakistani Muslim teenager in Norway who had followed my works online and was an admirer created the name of my Facebook public page.

So I was surprised to see a page about myself on there, and I became friends with her, and she talked to me about the Islamophobia, racism, xenophobia in Norway that a lot of Muslims, both immigrants and European-born youths, faced from other people. She was drawn to my works, to my anger and political awareness in my art, to my struggle existing as a Deaf South Asian Muslim woman of color immigrant punk rocker in a hearing white man’s world.

Eventually I took over the Facebook page. I like the name of the Facebook page, because it helps shows the world that I am: Deaf, Muslim, Punk, and Playwright. I wanted deaf people out there to see my name come up in results for “deaf” and see that there’s a working deaf artist who has a career in theatre, filmmaking and playwriting, these fields which are very difficult for deaf people to break into. I also wanted Muslims to find me in search results and see that there’s a Muslim woman filmmaker / artist / performer. I wanted other Muslim women to find me and enjoy my works.

And I wanted the world-- whether hearing, deaf, non-Muslim, or Muslim, to see that I am not a stereotypical “deaf and dumb” girl, or that I was NOT a “helpless  / oppressed” Muslim girl who needed to be saved....

KHN – As an author you wrote and self-published your first novel, Urdustan (A Collection of Short Stories), a book of short stories about South Asians from all walks of life.  Why did you think this book is important and tell us why you end up self-publishing it?

Sabina England – The book has many short stories and features characters from different backgrounds. There are Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis, punk rockers and deaf youths, Hasidic Jews and gay people. All the short stories were loosely inspired by true events in my life...

KHN - Your short videos are a mixture of politics, laughter, nature and such.  Please give us a brief rundown on “Allah Save the Punk!”...

Sabina England – I made “Allah Save the Punk!” because I wanted to do a light comedy with a storyline using both punk rockers and religious extremists from a Muslim punk rock perspective. Growing up in Northern England in the 1980s, I always liked punk rock and I was just drawn to the subculture for its sheer anger and energy, but also for its political awareness. I just wanted to have fun and make other Muslims laugh at ourselves. Humor is the best medicine! We all know that one person in our community who’s a self-righteous, holier-than-thou person, and I wanted to create a self-righteous character that is so full of themselves and so extreme in their beliefs. I created the Mullah, who was so religious and holy, but somehow ended up with a punk rock daughter. That’s pretty funny, right?!

Also the title “Allah Save the Punk!” was inspired from “God Save the Queen” by Sex Pistols...

KHN - On your website it says you are apart of S.O.S Records, an underground Los Angeles streetpunk label, and have often been linked to the Taqwacores scene.  Please explain.

Sabina England – I was a friend with Rob Chaos, the lead singer from Total Chaos, we became friends on MySpace in the mid 00s and stayed in touch. He liked some of my posts and liked my attitude so he asked me to be the face of S.O.S Records, they printed out promotional flyers with my face and put it up at punk shows everywhere! I was also asked to appear in Taqwacore (the documentary) and I said no because I had some problems at the time and I didn’t feel ready to do the project. So they used one of my photos (with my permission) and put it in the film. So ever since then a lot of people have associated me with both.

Read the whole interview here.