Empowering Arab-Centred Narratives
One of five Western Sydney creatives selected for In the Room, Lebanese Australian Muslim writer and performer Randa Sayed brings humour and heart to a special film collaboration between Co-Curious and Powerhouse.
‘Growing up as an Arab woman, I have often felt like an alien with amnesia. I have never been to Lebanon and Australia has always felt a little foreign to me. I think now I am older, I am starting to accept the comedy within it all. Rather than sitting in stories of the “other”, I relish in writing stories that reflect the characters and masks that make us feel like we “belong” in an empowering way.’
With Lebanese Australian writer and actor Randa Sayed (who has also performed under the stage name of Aanisa Vylet), her twin talents are inextricably bound, seeking a communication style somewhere between bodily expression and the written word. ‘I was quite a sensitive kid, and I found that writing was the way that I could express things,’ says Sayed. ‘Then as I went to a Western Sydney public high school where being smart wasn’t expected or cool, I started to distrust my own writing skills. Slowly, I have been rediscovering the narratives that are true to my lived experience with an Arab Australian Muslim background. It has also been a very slow journey back to trusting the way I write, how I express things and my own sensibility as a writer. And I’m still discovering that.’
In between, and not unlike Alia, the intensely curious soul she wrote and embodied for the 2015 short film The Parisian, Sayed went to France to start a journey of self-discovery. Having already graduated with a Bachelor of Performance from Western Sydney University, in Paris she studied clowning and mime at the physical theatre schools of Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier. ‘I wanted to find a way to really communicate things through the body, through a poetic expression that didn’t need the English language or particular words per se,’ she says. And through this period of intense physicality as a performer beyond the spoken word, Sayed discovered herself as a writer.
