Eric and Ayka sit down with multimedia artist, researcher, and storyteller Husna Abubakar to talk about what it really means to be Swahili in a world that keeps getting it wrong.
Husna shares her experience as a third culture Swahili woman from Mombasa, Kenya, growing up between the Swahili coast and the U.S., and how that tension pushed her to question Western ideas of success, identity, and “the right way” to live. She breaks down Occidental vs. Orientalist frameworks, talks honestly about being a woman of color at RISD in a deeply colonial city, and why she set out to decolonize her own design practice.
They get into her shift from graphic design into film, textiles, and installation, her powerful work around Swahili homes, motherhood, and matrifocal culture, and the responsibility she feels as the first in her family to earn a graduate degree. Husna closes with a message for creatives caught between cultures: your indigeneity isn’t a problem to fix—it’s your power.
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