Darius Kamali is a former analyst with the State Department-supported International Monitor Institute, the visual evidence wing for several tribunals on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. He transitioned to political documentary, then to television and feature animation producing in Hollywood, as executive producer on a number of movies. Recently the global pandemic provided the opportunity and catalyst for Kamali to return to his roots and his passion with two genre-bending, timely, thought-provoking, and critically acclaimed books; Mistake of Identity and Dog Whistling Dixie Past the Graveyard.
Darius Kamali impresses with his thought process
Misstake of Identity is a genre-bending collection of short musings, at once worldly and idealistic, hardboiled and spiritual. It combines the conventions of the social media post with the traditions of the philosophical aphorism, and eastern wisdom literature. The book consists of a series of concise, often witty, sometimes dark, counterintuitive, even contrarian thoughts that boldly tread our contemporary sociopolitical fault lines. It playfully uses parody and paradox to pry past the surface of the political trope. And it searches for a truth that lies deeper than either the ideological talking point or hackneyed partisan convention.
Dog Whistling Dixie Past The Graveyard is a collection of dark poems of ironic, paradoxical reflections of varied length on the ephemeral and ever-present shadow of identity. It combines the deeply personal with the broadly social, and gnostic insight with political polemic. The book reflects unconscious and fractured nature of the individual self in our socially fraught and uncertain times. It also offers glimpses of a spiritual, post-identity-based path forward.
Listen to the entire interview with Darius Kamali. Those who listened to it live loved it and thought the dialogue was a good start.