I’ve always been enraged by the injustice in this world. My life has been defined by wars, violent sanctions, and a US/UK occupation that caused insurmountable tragedy to my life and to the lives of millions of others. Coming to the UK from Iraq was easy for me; staying almost cost me my health and sanity.
And so, in a desperate attempt to make sense of the world I grew up in and the great forces that orchestrate violence and death at will, I went to university and studied political science, international relations and anthropology. As the quest for justice is a serious matter, I believed the only way to go about it was to do so very seriously.
For years after graduating, I worked with grassroots movements and human rights organisations, desperately hoping to contribute to change. But after many heartbreaking attempts, I resorted to comedy. I realised that my childhood dream of performing was not merely a frivolous passion but a way to engage with the world, and 10 years ago I retrained as a physical theatre performer.
Earlier this month, I performed as part of Counterpoints Arts’ refugee comedy collective, No Direction Home (which currently has a residency at Soho theatre), alongside fellow performers Nish Kumar, Jessica Fostekew, Anastasia Chokuwamba and Teddy. The collective was clearly ours – we the displaced, we the rovers, the migrants, the seekers of refuge and dignity; we the longtime residents and the fresh-off-the-back-of-a-lorry. We pledged allegiance to our common love of laughter – simple, basic, profound.
I am a first-generation migrant or refugee (take your pick), fully “alien”, freshly naturalised Brit doing standup comedy, so you may expect me to speak of “the” migrant/refugee experience, crafting joke after joke about Tory hypocrisy.
But the Tories aren’t my punchline, hypocrisy is. Being human is messy but you aren’t allowed to mess up so appallingly when you hold all that power. What we are living through today is not only the collapse of a social, economic and political system heralded by an unashamedly corrupt and failed political party, but a generally failing political and economic system that is gasping to stay alive. This ruling party has been left to orchestrate unimaginable suffering with no real, meaningful opposition.
We are told asylum seekers need to go through legal routes and not “jump the queue”, but legal routes don’t exist for non-Ukrainians (as Suella Braverman has all but admitted), so people are forced to resort to dangerous means and then are labelled criminals for it. Instead of countering the poisonous “stop the boats” narrative that has led to the deaths of scores of people seeking refuge, Labour has proudly announced that it will stop the boats better than the Tories.
How has this become the national sport when about four in 10 low-income families are spending less on food for their children, and when nurses and teachers are struggling to make ends meet? Have politicians really succeeded in making us believe that drowning the next incoming dinghy will end homelessness, food and fuel poverty, increase wages for key workers and save the NHS?
But this isn’t just about exposing the hypocrisy of those in power, ruling or otherwise, it is about remembering what we are told to forget daily – our common humanity. Comedy can trace the cracks and faultlines of our political systems but it also confronts the fears and confusions of our own minds and hearts. It lightly proposes other ways of seeing, of being. It has the power to rehumanise; to rewild our imagination, reopen our hearts and, after a few (hopefully) bellowing laughs, to confront us with the question, can we bear seeing ourselves? More importantly, what are we going to do about this?
Twenty years ago my father reopened his sweet shop in Baghdad hours before the US/UK invasion, after it had been forced to close because of the 1991 Gulf war. He served Iraqis nougat, manna and baklawa in times of violent occupation. My father was a great storyteller who loved making people laugh. He was the first to show me how tragedy can alchemise into comedy.
For me, doing standup is about becoming comfortable with and sharing the contradictory mess of being human, about being vulnerable in the face of injustice, becoming a mirror, a reflection, and a hammer. It is where I seek refuge – where other worlds are fearlessly imagined and dreams allowed to breathe. So I perform comedy – even in a Britain where some dream of sending me and the likes of me to Rwanda. And I think of my father, Oussama Ghrawi, the sweets-maker of Baghdad, who lived and died a dreamer, and all who are brave enough to spread joy in the face of injustice and violence.
Yasmeen Audisho Ghrawi is a comedian and performer. Her one-person show, From the Daughter of a Dictator, opens on 3 July 2023 as part of the London Shubbak festival before going on a national tour. ‘No Direction Home’ is at Soho Theatre 22 May and 26 June
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