For Love, From the Law
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Humeysha and Theopoetics

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the many become one and are increased by one.

                                                 -- AN Whitehead

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"Zain Alam is a storyteller and musician whose work explores South Asian artistic traditions, transnational movements in the Islamic world, and diasporic identity in the U.S. Raised in Kennesaw, GA, he graduated from Wesleyan University where he wrote a thesis on the makings of an Indian Muslim and muhajir diaspora after Partition. He returned to India on the AIF Clinton fellowship as a story scholar for the 1947 Partition Archive. During this time, he wrote the songs that grew into the NYC-based band and recording project, Humeysha. He is presently a graduate student of Islamic studies at Harvard University, seeking to enrich the aesthetic and conceptual processes behind his creative endeavors."

Village Voice on Humeysha's For Love, From the Law

Interview with Zain Alam in the Village Voice (April 15; 2016) by Tara Mahadevan.  See entire interview above, with an excerpt below:

"The video opens with a drawing of an Indian woman, and Zain Alam sitting on a grass-covered hexagon in the middle of a white room, wearing all white and surrounded by bright green foliage. First he’s alone, and then two girls — also dressed in white — appear, dancing while Alam sings in a mixture of Hindi-Urdu and English. At some point, his kohl-circled eyes look longingly at a guitar across the room, and the girls try to stop him as he reaches for the instrument through the fronds. He eventually picks it up and sits on the floor, the guitar sitting in his lap like a sitar. The lyrics fade away into an interlude, and the video shifts to kaleidoscopic imagery....'For me, it was both lived experience and academic study of the culture, of these musical traditions, of how raga works, of how rhythms are supposed to work.'...The song 'For Love, From the Law' was one of the first songs he wrote, and alternates between the same Hindi-Urdu verse and an English chorus. 'I remember that when I had [written the songs] in the way that I did and picked the words that I did, it was after having the realization that so many of these stories that I was hearing of people displaced from Pakistan to India, India to Pakistan — leaving for something, leaving for someone, and then having this very unfulfilled dream of what migration would entail.' He keeps the lyrics simple because the song acts as a distillation of these stories, which he was hearing from strangers and family members alike. Through the song, he articulates a common immigrant experience — the feeling of striving for so much but then feeling let down once reality sets in. “For Love, From the Law” particularly communicates themes of moving and longing."

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​Notes in the Margin: The Music Video as Theopoetics

For Love, from the Law is filled with contrasts: sonic, linguistic, historical, aspirational.  It reflects a longing for the new and a clinging to the old.  It is from the Law: Yes.  But it it is also to the Law of love and longing.  

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I use the word "contrast" in a Whiteheadian sense.  In Whitehead a contrast is a living whole in which the particulars (linguistic, musical, narrative, historical) are intensified by being juxtaposed with others.  In this case the particulars include the languages, the very symbolism of the guitar, albeit with raga-like tones for its background, and the quiet story-line.

For process theologians the desire for this kind of harmony - this kind of contrastive whole -- is indeed spiritual, not in a sense that it seeks to escape the world but in the sense that it seeks the sacred in the world, The seeking is an act of faith: faith in the very possibility that meaning can be made and satisfaction found amid the movements and longings of life.

Within this faith there is an implicit response to the indwelling lure of the Beloved.  The lure is invitational not coercive. It cannot force but it can beckon; and it beckons us, among other things, to improvise our lives in constructive and life-giving ways, relative to what is possible. .

It is a lure by which, as it happens, the entire universe is always coming into existence. Animals and plants feel it, too, and respond in their ways.  So do the angels and the stars.  They naturally surrender to its calling.  

We humans have to work at it.  We can respond and not respond.  We can be voluntary muslims.

One of the lure's many names is theos and a primary way that is it expressed and communicated is poieis: the making of things.  Theopoetics is the telling of stories and the making of art in response to the lure.  "For Love, from the Law" is a music video, to be sure, and also theopoetics.   And the Love for which the video is made?  Is it human?  Divine?  Both?  Neither?  Let's leave that to the imagination of the listener.

​-- Jay McDaniel

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More music by Humeysha

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