{"id":27264,"date":"2008-06-04T09:24:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-04T09:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/?p=27264"},"modified":"2024-07-04T14:14:48","modified_gmt":"2024-07-04T06:14:48","slug":"zaitun-mohamed-kasim-1966-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/articles\/2008\/06\/zaitun-mohamed-kasim-1966-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Zaitun Mohamed Kasim: 1966 – 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Some years ago, Time<\/em>\nmagazine ran a cover story asking, “Do the good die young?” It’s what\ncomes to mind now, with the news that Zaitun Kasim — known as Toni to almost\neveryone — left us a few hours ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toni Kasim was a good person, and she died much too\nsoon. Is there a cosmic bargain that bestows certain individuals some unique\ngift, in exchange for a shorter lease on life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a simple word, good. An almost impoverished\nadjective, surrounded as we are by superlatives nowadays. Awesome — to inspire\nawe — is reduced into the verbal equivalent of a fist in the air, greeting the\nmost mundane of actions. “Fantastic”, “extraordinary”,\n“wonderful”, “amazing”, is applied like a cheap neon\nhighlighter to people and places and events which are at best, footnotes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it’s a word which fits Toni, for she was many\ndifferent shades of good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was good at what she did. Over the years, Toni’s\ninvolvement in civil society reforms has not so much blossomed as it has spread\nits roots deep and wide: human rights, gender and sexuality, freedom of expression,\nfreedom of religion, political accountability. Like many activists, she had a\ngrasp of the theory, the issues, the politics, and the policies. She also had\nan eye for the minute and the absurd. She once said “It drives me crazy\nwhen the papers report ‘six people were injured in the accident, including one\nwoman.”‘<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toni somehow found time for art. She made it, she\nwatched it, she wrote about it and she courted the company of its most talented\nmembers. She was once a member of a Tamil-language theatre group, which saw no\ncontradiction in using languages other than Tamil in its productions. She sang\nwith an a capella group. She was a diligent Cameronian Arts Awards and indie\nfilm judge; a reviewer of films and theatre for this website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was good to the people around her. The best\nmeasure of a person is perhaps the company they keep, or rather the company\nwhich keeps them. Toni’s friends can speak for themselves, and some have\nalready, in blogs and notes posted online. Suffice to say here, is that as her\nillness surfaced, she faced it holding the hands of others who reflected her\ngoodness back to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She did good. Toni, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Elaine of Seinfeld, was an energizing presence wherever she went. Working in a field that offers little financial security and even less prestige in our doctor-lawyer-\u00adcopywriter world, Toni made things happen. It may be hard to pinpoint the exact life she changed, the policy she overturned, the Article of the constitution she strengthened, the misrepresented Koran verse she restored meaning to. But to all who knew her, there is little doubt that Toni\u2019s work, and the way she lived her life, lifted our world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Toni, we saw something exemplary. We found, in her\nmany parts, what was lacking in ourselves. But rather than feelings of\ninadequacy, she filled us with a sense of the achievable, because she was not\n‘awesome’, or ‘fantastic’ or ‘amazing’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do the good die young? Or does their passing, at any\nage, seem too soon, their time with us too brief, the loss too big?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To pockets of family, friends, loves around the world, in the arts community, and the local and international world of advocacy, the time was too, too brief. We have a palpable loss that finds itself shaped as a woman with curly black hair, dangling earrings, a big hug and an even bigger heart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

~~~ <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First Published: 04.06.2008 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some years ago, Time magazine ran a cover story asking, “Do the good die young?” It’s what comes to mind now, with the news that Zaitun Kasim — known as Toni to almost everyone — left us a few hours ago. Toni Kasim was a good person, and she died much too soon. Is there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":10,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,3622,3539],"tags":[484,246,3670,3671],"language":[7523],"writer":[7617],"class_list":["post-27264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-obituary","category-visual-arts","tag-obituary","tag-toni-kasim","tag-zaitun-kasim","tag-zaitun-mohamed-kasim","language-english","writer-kakiseni"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27264"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39103,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27264\/revisions\/39103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27264"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=27264"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}