EGN NEWS DESK
Before leaving Afghanistan in 2021, the artist Matin Malikzada took pleasure in making pottery with the normal supplies and instruments his household cherished for generations.
He used to combine his personal clay dug from a mountainside close to Istalif, a village north of Kabul that’s recognized for its ceramics. He would kick his potter’s wheel along with his sandaled proper foot and make his shiny turquoise glaze from the ishkar plant, which grows within the close by desert.
Now Malikzada, 38, is recreating his life as an artist within the city of New Milford, Conn., about 80 miles northeast of Manhattan. His household of six are among the many 6.4 million refugees or asylum seekers from Afghanistan who now dwell overseas. “I had greater than 30 years’ expertise, however the whole lot was new for me right here,” he stated in an interview. “I felt like a child.”
In Connecticut, Malikzada needed to study to make use of factory-made clay, an electrical wheel with a unique top and pace, and chemical substances to create glazes. It took 415 experiments for him to provide you with his signature colours, he stated.
“I needed to take a look at, take a look at, take a look at,” he stated. “Sometimes it got here out very loopy, however my father taught me to all the time suppose optimistic.”
Malikzada’s surprising journey to the United States started about three and a half years in the past, when the Taliban was taking up Kabul and U.S. troops had been withdrawing from Afghanistan. After securing an evacuation flight to Qatar and spending months in momentary housing websites there and in North Macedonia, he and his spouse and 4 kids arrived in Virginia in 2022. They had been amongst an estimated 76,000 Afghans admitted to the United States legally within the 12 months after the troop withdrawal. Most, just like the Malikzadas, acquired what is called humanitarian parole.
New Milford Refugee Resettlement, an area nonprofit, discovered housing for Malikzada’s household and lined their preliminary lease funds. Literacy Volunteers on the Green, one other native nonprofit, despatched English tutors. Neighbors drove the youngsters to medical doctors’ appointments. Local potters have given him supplies and kiln time. His landlord is letting him make pottery within the basement as Malikzada rebuilds his enterprise. A church lets him retailer stock in a again room. And a professional bono bookkeeper information his state gross sales taxes month-to-month, whereas an accountant does his earnings taxes.
After Malikzada arrived within the United States, a volunteer discovered him a carpentry job constructing drawers in a furnishings manufacturing unit. For a number of months, he labored there through the day and created pottery at night time.
Stephen Gass, an entrepreneur and mentor to Malikzada, thought the manufacturing unit job wasted the artist’s experience and will harm his palms. Gass helps him develop his pottery enterprise as an alternative. “His work ethic is staggering,” Gass stated.
When Malikzada created a brand new line of tableware, he named it “Together,” to honor everybody who helped him alongside the best way. “I don’t know the best way to say thanks sufficient,” he stated.
Word about Malikzada’s work is spreading. The designer Diane von Furstenberg, who has a house in Litchfield County, Conn., heard about him from a good friend. She visited Malikzada’s basement studio and acquired greater than two dozen bowls and plates. “They are beautiful,” she stated. “I’ve an enormous tender spot for refugees. It’s a terrific asset to have them on this nation and group.”
Malikzada, a seventh-generation potter, continues to be adjusting to his new life. “I had a really good job, good home, good enterprise, all my household there,” he stated about Afghanistan. The hardest half is lacking his family. His mother and father died, one after the opposite, after he left.
“My life is sort of a bowl. That bowl is damaged,” he stated. “Now I made a bowl once more, however it wants firing, it wants a glaze, it takes time.”
Sometimes, Malikzada stated, he works for 16 hours a day preparing for native craft festivals and artwork reveals. Often his spouse, Najila, helps him carve symmetrical designs that counsel flowers and leaves into clay bowls earlier than glazing. By final summer time, the enterprise earned sufficient to cowl their lease, groceries and different bills. “I don’t have weekends,” Malikzada stated. “Someone says, ‘Where are you going Saturday?’ I say, ‘To a phenomenal place: my basement.’”
Last summer time, Malikzada taught a sequence of courses to potters on the Village Center for the Arts in New Milford.
As the scholars hunched over pottery wheels and chatted, Malikzada answered questions on the best way to make a deal with, add a spout and keep away from undesirable grooves. He confirmed them how he used his knuckle to clean a wall, and the way he stored the lip of a vase thick at first to permit for the piece to stretch upward.
“Here, push, come up, up, up, now by the finger,’’ he advised a scholar. “It will not be onerous, you simply want follow,” he stated. “Practice 1, 2, 3 and also you’ll make it extra lovely than me.”
The college students marveled at how Malikzada might throw a tall vase in a couple of minutes, create a lid that matches a teapot with out measuring, and spin clay for hours with out getting a speck on his garments.
“He has a fluidity that comes from doing it the identical means thousands and thousands of instances,” stated Jane Herold, a potter who attended one in every of Malikzada’s courses. “People who come from an artwork college background are agonizing about what form to make. He’s not. He’s making the shapes he is aware of, that his father knew. It’s a really totally different factor from the best way loads of trendy, self-conscious potters work.”
Malikzada’s household of six was accepted for asylum final fall. They celebrated with a feast of kebabs at Hasna’s Grill, an Afghan fusion restaurant in close by Waterbury. He stated his subsequent steps can be making use of for a inexperienced card, and ultimately citizenship.
One day, Osman, his 6-year-old son, could possibly be the eighth era of potters within the household. “He made 20 pots,” Malikzada stated, smiling at his little boy.
In January, the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development gave Malikzada an award as an “rising inventive” contributing to the state’s artwork scene. And he’s preparing for a sequence of crafts festivals in Connecticut and New York, together with at Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, the Rhinebeck Crafts Festival and Crafts New York at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park.
“I really feel higher this 12 months than final 12 months,” Malikzada stated. “Hopefully on a regular basis I’ll suppose optimistic, day by day, each month. Step by step.”
