COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, October 29, 2005 7:00 pm
If you were best friends with Ghazal Mahjouri Samani, you’d know she’s obsessed with black people.
The way they dress. The way they talk. And especially the way they dance.
You’d probably be in the sixth grade with her. Between classes, you’d move down the hallway with her, shuffling your shoes just like Ciara does on MTV and singing “1, 2 Step.”
This beat is automatic supersonic hypnotic funky fresh,
Work my body so melodic,
This beat flows right through my chest …
Let me see you 1, 2 step …
You’d watch Ghazal dance at recess and try to copy her.
Girl, you might say, those moves are tight.
Most of her best friends are black. But that wasn’t how it was a few years ago, when she came to Lincoln from a school and a place where there were no blacks.
You wouldn’t have wanted to be her friend then if you were black. You probably would have looked at her on the playground like she was stupid and known nothing about what she’d been through.
And she would have looked at you as an enemy.
But now everything’s changed. She’s cool. Her popularity at Lefler Middle School grows every day.
One night a couple of years ago, she took a first step to understanding black people.
And then the next day, on the playground with all the girls watching, she took a second step. …
And felt the beat flow right through her chest.
And changed.
If you were best friends with her now, before gym class you two would hurry up and change out of the hiphop-style clothes you stole from each other’s closets so you could practice your moves in the locker room.
You’d know Ghazal doesn’t do the booty pop.
No. Everyone else does the booty pop. That’s just shaking your butt to the floor and back. Nothing original in that.
You’d know she likes to make up her own routines or do her “Honey moves” — dancing like you’re dribbling a basketball and then shooting, doing that arm thing like you’re rolling dice, the body rolls and backward hops.
You’d know “Honey” is a movie that stars Jessica Alba and rappers Lil’ Romeo and Missy Elliott. It’s about a hiphop dancer named Honey who follows her dream to open a dance studio for ghetto kids.
You’d play the “Honey” movie CD over and over, going each time to “Special Features” on the menu to learn the moves from the real “Honey” choreographer.
You’d know “Honey” totally changed your best friend’s life.
Now she dreams of being a hiphop dancer on MTV and starting a hiphop dance studio for kids someday and being a choreographer.
And you’d know her more immediate plans: to have a hiphop slumber party Friday night.
If you were best friends with her, you’d probably be helping her plan it right now, making posters to hang in the basement rec room and talking about how cool it’ll be.
She needs a disco light.
You’d think she was so pretty, maybe tell her she looks like Alicia Keys with her tight braids and big brown eyes and skin like hot chocolate with lots of milk.
Alicia Keys is “mixed,” which means she has one black parent and one white parent.
You probably wouldn’t be as good a dancer as Ghazal.
Few Lefler sixth-graders are, even the kids who take classes at the studios.
She’s so good even the eighth-graders stop and watch her dance down in the hallway.
This beat is automatic supersonic hypnotic funky fresh,
Work my body so melodic,
This beat flows right through my chest …
Let me see you 1, 2 step …
Yo! Girl! Are you mixed?
No, she tells them, smiling. But I wish I were. That’d be cool.
I’m from Iran.
Learning about hate
She hated black people when she came to Lincoln in third grade.
She thought they were dirty and scary. They fought on the playground.
There were many black kids at Elliott Elementary. There were none in her school in Iran, where she would go in a long blue dress and white veil that covered everything but her face and hands.
Don’t touch me.
That’s what she’d tell black kids once she learned enough English.
Ghazal’s family came to Lincoln because her parents had relatives here. They told her Lincoln was safe and full of friendly people.
Her family belongs to the Baha’i religious faith. Only 2 percent of Iranians are Baha’i. The government of Iran is a theocracy, run by conservative Muslims, and Baha’I followers are not Muslim.
Men in uniforms would knock on the front door, any hour of the day, and take away things related to the Baha’i faith and anything else they wanted, even home videos and photo albums of her and her baby sister on their birthdays and first days of school.
One man with a gun would stand at the door. He wouldn’t let anyone in or out.
Her dad owned his own glass company. He liked being his own boss. Her mom stayed home and took care of Ghazal and her and baby sister, Behar.
Her parents were about to build a three-story apartment building that would make money.
They decided to leave because they wanted their girls to go to college.
And not be so hated.
Hip Hop 101
Derek Jones is the hottest DJ around. He’s 27. Runs a barber shop, just like the guy “Honey” fell in love with.
Derek looks like the rapper Ludacris, Ghazal thinks. He’s come to Lefler this quarter to teach “Hip Hop 101,” an after-school program sponsored by the YMCA.
He’s teaching the five elements of hip hop: History, Graffiti Art, DJing, MCing and Break dancing.
This beat is automatic supersonic hypnotic funky fresh,
Work my body so melodic,
This beat flows right through my chest …
You have to hear the message in hiphop music, he tells Ghazal and the other kids. It’s street poetry. Some messages are good. Some are bad – the gangsta stuff about sex and thugging and money.
He plays the bad messages, too, and lets them know the bad stuff is not the reality of hiphop, just the business of selling records.
Look at movies in Hollywood, he says. That’s not reality, is it?
Hip hop can be a force for bringing people together, he tells them — blacks, whites, people all colors.
It can put people in black people’s shoes.
You can’t talk like a white boy if you want to rap. You can’t dance like a white girl if you want to move to hip hop music.
Ghazal just sat there those first few classes, saying little.
Derek thought she was bored.
One day, he told the kids in the class that they’d be dancing at a hiphop showcase at the local university soon, and they needed to come up with a tight routine.
Ghazal came up to him the next class.
She grabbed her friend Andy, a black girl who can dance, too, and they busted out a routine for him.
Wow, Derek said. That’s hot. Who put that together?
I did, Ghazal said. Last night.
A few classes later, Derek told the class there would be a talent show at the end of the quarter and they needed to come up with a skit about what they learned in Hip Hop 101, and a real dance.
Ghazal, he says, you’re the choreographer.
Learning about love
If you were Ghazal’s best friend, you might be at her home, a split-level with green shutters in south Lincoln, sitting legs crossed with her on her bedroom’s pink carpet.
The spicy aroma of her mom’s Iranian food drifting in, despite the closed door.
You might be listening to hiphop songs on Ghazal’s CD player, and watching her flip through page after page of the singers she loves, ripped from teen magazines.
“Here’s Usher. Everybody knows Usher. Did you know he has a camp for kids? I would love to go to that camp.
“Here’s Ciara. And Omarion. And Ashanti – she’s a role model, too. And I love Beyonce so much, too. That’s my biggest dream, to be famous like them someday. But I don’t know how these people become famous like this.
“I want everybody to know me and love me.”
She loves her family a lot. How her dad works so hard at Lincoln Plating and her mom works so hard as a cook for Park Middle School.
But thinks it’d be cool if she had black people in her family.
“I just love black people. Most my friends are black now. If I had 50 personal friends, 40 of them would be black.”
She pulls a purple notebook from a shelf and reads a hip hop song she’s writing.
Give it all you got, girl, give it all you got, you can take your chance and take your best shot …
“This song, it’s not that good yet. And it’s not finished. I need a word that rhymes with ‘kiss.’”
Later, in the kitchen, she puts on a new CD and smiles. Rap music fills the house. But it sounds a little different.
“Guess where this is from?”
“Iran?”
“Yeah,” she says, dancing. “There’s even rap in Iran now.”
Her world changed, Ghazal would tell you, that night she saw “Honey.”
That’s when she started to get it. That black people were just people, full of goodness like Honey and the other the main characters. That people of every color could get along.
That black people could look all tough, like Missy Elliott in the film, but also be sweet and that maybe she shouldn’t judge black people so much.
That maybe what she was thinking about them was like what Iran’s government was thinking about her and her family.
That maybe she was like that guy at the door with the gun, not letting people in or out.
She wasn’t letting people in. Or letting herself come out.
If you were Ghazal’s friend, you would know that what happened the next day on the Elliott playground changed everything in her world, too.
Taking those first steps
In fourth grade, she was mainstreamed from special English classes into the regular classroom. She had to sit at a table right next to a black girl. Ghazal shot her a dirty look – one of those stay-away-from-me looks.
The girl glared right back.
At recess at Elliott, the boys usually would play basketball while the girls would play music on a little CD player and dance. Mostly just the booty pop.
She would stand there by the other girls, arms crossed, watching, but saying nothing.
One night halfway through fourth grade, she saw a DVD of “Honey.” For hours, she practiced the Honey moves over and over. She added some of her own.
The next day at recess, instead of standing there staring, she started dancing. Some girls stared at her, like she was stupid or something.
Oh, I can do that, they told her.
Well then show me, she said. And they couldn’t.
But most girls were like, Oh, Ghazal, that’s tight. Can you teach me?
Yeah, she said. And they danced.
Leflerpalooza
The music starts. Kids of all colors are dancing on the stage.
Some can move. Some can’t.
A white kid is the DJ, scratching the vinyl and bobbing his head at the turntables and mixer at the back of the stage.
Ghazal and Andy are out front.
Ciara sings:
This beat is automatic supersonic hypnotic funky fresh,
Work my body so melodic,
This beat flows right through my chest …
Let me see you 1, 2 step …
If you were best friends with Ghazal, you’d be really proud of her right now, knowing how far she’s come.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.