Taste of Place

Episode 9

The Power of Storytelling

[00:00:00] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: A taste of place, of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a way to belong, a way to look to the past and to build a future. My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste and memory throughout the series. Welcome to Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:29] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Earlier this year, Queen Elizabeth II passed away as the longest reigning monarch of the UK. Many mourned the loss of a fixture of British life for generations, but many more were reminded once again of the colonial legacy that still remained even after her passing. I think about this every time I go home to Borneo when I have coffee and the beautifully maintained repurposed colonial [00:01:00] courthouse in Cuching or walk past Fort Sylvia

[00:01:04] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: at the riverside in Kapit, which is now a museum of the town's beginnings. These buildings, like many others, are a source of historical pride as well as generational trauma, reminders of foreign law that was enforced, and also the agency to reshape and change, an acknowledgement of being present during those times.

[00:01:29] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Memories of colonialism are messy. And the past is a living memory. Throughout Taste of Place, we have delved into the idea of flavor and scent in relationship to memory, and our idea of nostalgia. In this episode, the power of Storytelling, we explore how sometimes those nostalgic memories are couched in the scars of colonialism and how understanding those contradictions can help us better understand what we're truly nostalgic [00:02:00] for.

[00:02:03] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I speak with visual artist, Shiraz Bayjoo, pop-up creator Zolitha Magengelele and anthropologist, Mythri Jegathesan to contextualize everything we've discussed about place and food and learn more about the power and meaning behind sharing common space with others. 

[00:02:25] Shiraz Bayjoo: My name is Shiraz Bayjoo and I'm a visual 

[00:02:27] Shiraz Bayjoo: arist. I work across lots of mediums with different kinds of communities, and predominantly focused upon Western Indian Ocean, east Africa.

[00:02:36] Zolitha Magengelele: My name is Zolitha Magengelele from South Africa, Cape Town. I run a popup project called the Cooks Table, a dining experience celebrating and speaking to artists and being able to work with them and translate what they do through food. 

[00:02:52] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: As always, I begin with the same question I ask all my guests, what does pepper mean to you?[00:03:00] 

[00:03:00] Shiraz Bayjoo: I guess I discovered a much bigger world of pepper in my twenties when I was able to visit and be in different places. In Mauritius, pepper was not an ingredient that stood out on its own. It's used as part of other ground spices that are in a spice mix or a masala mix, or gramasala. But very rarely did we ever use pepper just individually on its own.

[00:03:25] Shiraz Bayjoo: When I grew up knowing Pepper on its own, it was to have on things like eggs, which was more synonymous with global North. And I remember my grandmother making me eggs when I would stay with her in my school holidays, and she would be trying to cook me the breakfast that she thought I would eat in the UK and put pepper on.

[00:03:43] Zolitha Magengelele: Black pepper doesn't jump to mind when you start cooking, and it's not anything that's been familiar with the food that I grew up eating, and even the food that I cook really. 

[00:03:53] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I met up with Shiraz and Zolita while they were preparing for their culinary popup. Shiraz and [00:04:00] I go way back. I met him when I was doing my PhD.

[00:04:03] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I had read an interview with him in one of my favorite magazines where he spoke so eloquently about the topics I was researching about home, belonging and diasporic relationships with colonialism and the post-colonial spaces. I reached out and was so grateful when he replied and we arranged to grab a coffee.

[00:04:23] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: By chance, he lived around the corner from me. And even more exciting was he was looking for someone to join his studio space and I needed a place to work. This was a beginning of a friendship that has lasted over a decade. And involved many eating, drinking, storytelling, and in depth discussions of identity, space, food, and memory.

[00:04:45] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: But one of the things I look back on is the time we shared the studio space. I would work late afternoon and evenings, and Shiraz would be there during the day. Our paths rarely crossed, but each day I would arrive and something new [00:05:00] had been added to a piece of artwork. All around me, the space was growing and changing.

[00:05:06] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I felt like I was working in a living space and Shiraz was building us a home away from home. The works were both familiar and comforting and changing and new, and the works related to so much that I was doing that they were provocative of thought and emotions for me as well as inspirations. There were pieces of home furniture that Shiraz was re-imagining in new ways with paint and colonial images imposed on them.

[00:05:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: It was the domestic space re-created. 

[00:05:38] Shiraz Bayjoo: During the period that we were sharing the studio together, I was working on this body of work based around Mauritius. My place of origin, of home, of family. Thinking through how the sort of movement towards independence, a colony island, what is the mechanisms? What are the ways that they move towards that?

[00:05:57] Shiraz Bayjoo: One of the things that I understood very early on is that [00:06:00] politics, the grassroots of politics, always starts in the most humble of spaces. And that the biggest movements, the movements, independence movements, movements of freedom, they start in people's kitchens. They start in the very simplest of settings.

[00:06:15] Shiraz Bayjoo: And when we start to think about what the language, what the aesthetics of that is, of how do we describe our own histories when we are laying out the foundations of understanding these spaces were spaces of family. They don't start off in grand holes or in big marches, particularly when you're talking about the process of decolonization.

[00:06:35] Shiraz Bayjoo: When I start to think about that space, it is domestic space. It is the home, and I guess in that way, We start to realize the spaces we create in our studios, those safe spaces that allows us to do this work that allows us to hold these conversations, these conversations about authoring your own future.

[00:06:52] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Zolitha Magengelele's work is also about sharing space and building a sense of home and belonging [00:07:00] into these creative studio spaces. Here she takes this idea of sharing a space and home further afield, opening it up. 

[00:07:09] Zolitha Magengelele: Having been privileged in being able to hang out in my friend's studios, art studios, I felt it was a space that needed to be shared and being able to cook and loving to cook and watching people eat, what better way of bringing the two together and having other people to experience that with me.

[00:07:25] Zolitha Magengelele: So in what you're saying, I'm creating or being the author of the spaces that you wanna be in and what they should look like, or how you imagine them and how you wanna share them with others. The actual feeling of being in the space and conversation, not just about the work, but about the thought process,

[00:07:42] Zolitha Magengelele: what's nourishing the mind, body, and soul while he's in that space, and what best way to use the tool that I know best, but to cook and say, come I'll cook, come and experience what I'm feeling when I'm in this artist space, and what food is and how he relates with food, or they relate with food when they're [00:08:00] in that space.

[00:08:01] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Zoltiha's work is so interesting as it blurs the line between public and private, home and the rest of the world. It is a fascinating process because artworks do have to leave the studio space at some point to be in the public space of a gallery. But what happens when your work is so centered on the personal and the home?

[00:08:21] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: How do you navigate the idea of home when the work itself is in public view? In considering this question, there is a piece of artwork of Shiraz' that has always stayed in my mind. It is an image of his grandmother's house in Mauritius. There are a lot of plants in the work, and at first glance, the space depicted could be seen as being indoors or outdoors, perhaps conveying a duality, but it to me does feel a very intimate, private space.

[00:08:54] Shiraz Bayjoo: The language of those spaces was so important to me, which is why they enter into being [00:09:00] artworks and why it feels important to share that with others. I haven't always presented that work, making it explicitly clear that this is a private family space, but people who've seen that work and do know where it's from have asked me if they could come to the house to see the real place.

[00:09:16] Shiraz Bayjoo: And I've always denied them because in the end, the real place is really very, very precious. And that does stay very private. But there are aspects of ourselves that we feel resonate deeply as symbolism, and sometimes we need to share those. 

[00:09:29] Zolitha Magengelele: Things that get left in the studio that you never get to see in the white box.

[00:09:33] Zolitha Magengelele: So when you are in the gallery, he needs to go and present it. When you are in that space where his entire thought process happens, spends most of his hours in, and it's, it's a privilege to be in that space and even more of a privilege for me to be able to bring others in. You trusting in that I'll bring the right people to share that with them as well. It's also a nice experience. 

[00:09:57] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Zolitha's events allow people to see [00:10:00] and share the personal landscape of the artist, even the parts that won't make it to the gallery. She's part of creating a story of the artists and their space. But how do we understand space when thinking about the past and building new stories?

[00:10:14] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The late geographer, Doreen Massey investigated the idea of space, time, and nostalgia. She wrote about an experience arriving back to her mother's house as an adult in which her mother had not made the cake she always made. She had experimented with a new recipe. Professor Massey was deeply disappointed in this, but realized she had placed home and her mother in a static space of childhood.

[00:10:41] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: To quote Dr. Massey, the past is no more static than the present. Nostalgia constitutively plays with notions of space and time. When nostalgia articulates space and time in such a way that it robs others of their histories, their stories, [00:11:00] then indeed we need to rework nostalgia. I asked Zolitha about her relationship with storytelling.

[00:11:07] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Does she feel responsible for these stories? How does she balance realities and not creating romantic notions of the artist at work and what does storytelling mean to her? 

[00:11:20] Zolitha Magengelele: What I said at the beginning was the trust, which is very important. It's creating that trust with the person's story that you about to tell.

[00:11:28] Zolitha Magengelele: I try and create a space where the story tells itself by being in the space, so I'm not actually standing and narrating what's happening and what's about to happen. There's so many angles or things or parts of a story that you miss. When you listen to a story, you listen to the best parts that you understand, and then you reinterpret it in the way that you heard it and you miss out on a lot of things.

[00:11:52] Zolitha Magengelele: A lot of people ask me, oh, where's the footage? Why don't we have any Instagram stories? Part of what I'm proud of what I do is [00:12:00] that fact that there isn't a moment in those moments for anyone to take out their picture with the artist or off the food. Which means they were involved, they were there, they experienced it fully, or you need to be in the moment and experienced it, and it genuinely happens.

[00:12:17] Zolitha Magengelele: I get a bit teary and goosebumps. It literally genuinely happens. My best feedback is when the artist says, my gosh, that's the best time I've had in my studio. I stand back and make the stories, tell itself and let the pages write themselves. I want you to experience it the way you want. There's always beer.

[00:12:35] Zolitha Magengelele: There's always food, there's always music. There's always art happening. So it's exactly the same experience, but yours has been made, has been prepared and heightened. Glad to know that I'm a storyteller. 

[00:12:45] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Our conversation naturally moved on to how we retell histories, such as the story of pepper. 

[00:12:51] Shiraz Bayjoo: The best way to do it is to do it with the community folks who are part of that history, part of that story. Alongside them, I think, where that's not possible, where [00:13:00] maybe those communities or those stories,

[00:13:01] Shiraz Bayjoo: one spends a lot of time thinking whether you should be working with something at all to begin with. I think there's a lot of factors that have to be very carefully navigated, but ultimately it's about treading very carefully and listening. I guess it's reframing, it's allowing others to tell their own stories and to break away from some of the stereotypes that we have imagined.

[00:13:23] Shiraz Bayjoo: We imagine in high regions of people through often very reductionist lenses. I don't think it's just important for this moment in time. One of the things that we have to continuously do is to reassess our relationship with the past, to understand it with the new insights that we have to date to reframe and allow others to take that space on.

[00:13:42] Shiraz Bayjoo: And I think in that sense, going back to cuisine and recipe, We find so many lines of connection between us. For example, here on the Cape here in South Africa, one of the biggest exports is Snoop Fish. Snoop Fish is the most sought after salt fish in Mauritius. It's one of our delicacies to eat, and yet [00:14:00] that is a fish that is so incredibly synonymous with slavery as a form of protein, as a food source.

[00:14:06] Shiraz Bayjoo: You start to see a very simple sort of immediacy of being in a place. You can see these connections, you can see those movements of people, and you can start to even understand the labor movements of people that have taken place just around that singular product. And the roots, the trade routes, the sea routes.

[00:14:21] Shiraz Bayjoo: All these things start to expand up and I think as we better understand our own histories around our own cuisine, where and how they have hybridized to be where they are today, it continues to evolve. And I think that's something quite precious is quite important though. 

[00:14:37] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This idea of evolution, labor, and trade is so connected to how I navigated my relationship with the past, with the story of Pepper as the conduit.

[00:14:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: As time has gone on, I've evolved the way I've looked at this plant, seen the labor that goes into farming, and try to find a different history than the one that typically gets told. [00:15:00] In my investigation of diaspora and building home, I see all these threads as being connected and need to be woven together so we can understand our place in the world, which then allows us to dream of an equitable future. But before the dreaming can begin, I wanted to find a way to unite these seemingly different strands of thinking.

[00:15:23] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Speaking with anthropologist, Mythri Jegathesan about the space of tea plantations in Sri Lanka helped me contextualize these thoughts. 

[00:15:33] Mythri Jegathesan: My name is Mythri Jegathesan. I am calling from the ancestral lands and the territories of the Muwekma Ohlone and the Tenon Nation. 

[00:15:40] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Mythri Jegathesan is an associate professor at Santa Clara University and has thought long and hard about the effects of colonialism, not only in Sri Lanka but also in indigenous communities across the globe. I begin my conversation with Mythri, like I, what does pepper [00:16:00] mean to you? 

[00:16:01] Mythri Jegathesan: I think of my mother's spice cupboard. I think of her spice cupboard, and particularly the smell of it. It was a staple in our kitchen growing up, and it was often one of the spices I would see outside my home.

[00:16:13] Mythri Jegathesan: I grew up in Connecticut in a predominantly white area in the 1980s, which was not a very comforting place, so I would see pepper. I was always amazed that I would see it in places like restaurants on the table, in grade school, at the kitchen, at the cafeteria. I'd be like, oh, there's a pepper shaker. So what does this mean?

[00:16:31] Mythri Jegathesan: And I knew it could make things spicy. I knew that because my mother would use it. It was almost like this connector between things that I knew in the home and things outside of my home. On a more physical level, I think it was something that I knew could provide healing. My mother would put it in things that she would prepare, and that was for colds, it was for sore throats, things like that.

[00:16:53] Mythri Jegathesan: So I just knew it was healing, in that sense. There is a dish, and it's called rustam. I always think black pepper [00:17:00] is the critical ingredient. It's a tamarin based broth that has garlic, tomatoes, curry leaves, mustard, cumin seed, coriander seed, coriander leaves, and it's stewed. And the black pepper is critical to the spice level, but then also the way that it mixes with the coriander, it has this healing property.

[00:17:20] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper for Mythri was something that was anchored in her mother's food and cooking from her cultural heritage, and therefore it was something she knew as coming from somewhere else, not the US. This led us to discuss how, as I brought up for the global South, feeds the global north through a flow of goods established from colonial trade with Pepper being a key example of how this is still happening.

[00:17:45] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I wanted to know how that relationship plays out in contemporary spaces. 

[00:17:50] Mythri Jegathesan: There are so many dialogues happening right now in Sri Lanka about the need for self-sufficiency going into this archive of what went wrong. What's [00:18:00] happening in Sri Lanka is one of the worst economic crises that the country has experienced, and the crisis itself is a food crisis, and it's a fuel crisis.

[00:18:09] Mythri Jegathesan: But people are saying it's related to certain points in the last 10 years and so forth. But it's actually, as some have argued, a long time in the coming right. It's decades of poor decision making on very majoritarian ethnonationalist governments to disregard minority rights, but also really promote this infrastructural development post-war to centralize power in the presidency.

[00:18:33] Mythri Jegathesan: And to not trust those who were producing that food. Mainly rural farmers, those who were economically marginalized and also minorities. Communities that I work with, mala thumhuls or hill country thumals on the tea and rubber plantations. And so what ended up happening was the government went into severe debt and then all the foreign reserves plummeted. On the smaller level,

[00:18:56] Mythri Jegathesan: most plantation workers don't even have the tea to drink, [00:19:00] right? But they're making that tea and paying back the country's debt. But the self-sufficiency component is missing in that sense of actually caring for the workers that are producing these crops or producing these commodities that are paying back debt.

[00:19:13] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I wanted to think about plantations more specifically, this idea of mapping of space and time, but how do we bring the past into the present and reimagine or tell new stories that give power to those who've been marginalized? So how does the past and the present relate or talk to each other within new spaces?

[00:19:32] Mythri Jegathesan: It is hard not to see the colonial past on the contemporary tea plantations in Sri Lanka. In some cases it's very blatant. For instance, Mackwood's tea plantation to have a cup of tea in their tea room, you see a glass enclosure and the spoon that Prince Charles has used for his tea and his sugar and his milk tea is sitting there.

[00:19:53] Mythri Jegathesan: But then there are the other smaller gestures, whether it's the superintendents hiked up boots or [00:20:00] khaki wardrobe that they wear, or the bigger umbrellas. So I think one way to kind of trouble that is to actually talk to people about what they want in their lives. Speaking to workers, thinking about what they do to nourish their families, their homes, plots of land that are next to their homes that are unowned plots of land.

[00:20:21] Mythri Jegathesan: This is how people we're living within it and surviving within it and still managed to do things quite creatively. It's like a lifting of a magician's curtain, right? The way to cultivate land. The expertise and the knowledge lies with those agricultural workers that have a history and indenture colonial migration, and in longer legacies of enslavement and dispossession.

[00:20:43] Mythri Jegathesan: Then you start to see that the trust actually should lie with them, and then what could happen to these plots of land and to the plantations. So I think centering on those really troubles the vista for me. It troubles the landscape and it also, at the same time, [00:21:00] there are people, communities, and workers that find that landscape beautiful and they should find it beautiful if that's their home, right?

[00:21:06] Mythri Jegathesan: So how do we sit with the different forms and to center what beauty actually is, or what home actually is. 

[00:21:13] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Mythri's work looks at the migrant communities that work the tree plantations and how they have made home and the creativity of this act. This work allows spaces of labor to be seen as spaces of beauty and home.

[00:21:28] Mythri Jegathesan: To me on the plantations, home is so much sensorily rooted in knowledge that has accumulated over generations. And on the landscape itself, you'll see hotels, guest houses, things that have come up very recently, but to me can be really helpful to see that accumulation of knowledge or to actually go with workers to talk to them about the footpaths that they made 20, 30 years ago.

[00:21:56] Mythri Jegathesan: But they're overgrown. They're not a footpath anymore, but to them, they're still [00:22:00] a footpath. And they can still provide access to get through a plantation in a more effective way than any other footpath would get them. But they made that footpath, so they created it. They carved the rock, they took tools, and they were hired to do this.

[00:22:13] Mythri Jegathesan: They were employees, but at the same time, they know the terrain of labor and of life to make their way through that overgrown footpath. They knew where to go, and I think that's the interesting thing is that not many people outside of the workers have that knowledge. That knowledge of how to actually grip a slippery rock that is in the rain with your toes because you don't have shoes on and you have 18 kilograms of tea on your back, and that's passed down through bodies and of people saying to their mothers, I see your body.

[00:22:45] Mythri Jegathesan: I see you as valuable. It's such an important passing down of knowledge. When your kin create that place, that's what I think of as home. Obviously there are shifts with more and more children working outside of the plantations because [00:23:00] they don't see plantation work as dignified. And that troubles the sense of home in many ways across generations.

[00:23:07] Mythri Jegathesan: But then I think even in those troubling spaces, when children are coming back to the plantations having worked elsewhere and they're bringing gifts, they're bringing remittances, things that would not exist on the plantations without that extra currency coming in. Things like glass window panes, television sets that are flat screen or speakers, things like that come in and they sit alongside the older objects as well. So an ame, that is a spice grinder that's been passed down for 200 years, or photographs of the dead that hang on the walls, for instance, in reverence. And so those are existing alongside of that, and I think that too is home.

[00:23:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Reframing these spaces is truly an act of stortelling.

[00:23:51] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And I wanted to ask Mythri, how do we tell these stories? How do we build new relationships across global spaces that allow for [00:24:00] complexities without having a voyeuristic lens? 

[00:24:03] Mythri Jegathesan: You're probably worried about that because you've seen it before, right? And we've seen it in development narratives. You see it replicated over and over again, not only in international development worlds, but anthropology is known for this of being the voice of the voiceless and so forth, and I think what's so helpful about Mohanty's work. 

[00:24:22] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Chandra Mohanty is a feminist scholar. In her book Under a Western Sky, she writes about the idea of how the global South is often seen as a monolith and investigates how we can work in solidarity across spaces across the world.

[00:24:38] Mythri Jegathesan: She has this guiding voice that is carefully thinking of who benefits from the idea of the monolith, right? So if the monolith is the voiceless or the marginalized or those on the periphery and so forth, who benefits from that? And then also, once they benefit from it, what are the social financial forms of capital that accumulate?

[00:24:58] Mythri Jegathesan: And then how do they use it, and [00:25:00] exercise power with it, but also around those monoliths so they get exercise in a particular way. And I think there's a stickiness to it, and that's maybe what you're referring to is the stickiness and contradictions. 

[00:25:13] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Throughout the journey we have traveled together on this show.

[00:25:16] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: There have been many moments of stickiness, as Mythri says. There is joy in seeing others' joy in eating Sarawak pepper. Seeing it in favorite London restaurants, witnessing the lack of transparency and supply chains, navigating the difference of beautiful descriptions of thic pepper flavors, then simultaneously the romanticization of Sarawak Pepper as a marketing ploy.

[00:25:42] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: What is your understanding of nostalgia and how does it relate to building home and belonging? 

[00:25:48] Mythri Jegathesan: I think nostalgia is always first and foremost a decision. Are we going to indulge and it could end badly. It's a decision to engage the past in a particular way. As I think of [00:26:00] my own childhood, being outside of Sri Lanka and not knowing certain things, whether about ethnonationalist violence,

[00:26:06] Mythri Jegathesan: my own family's histories, their displacement while I was here and quite privileged, but my family in Sri Lanka was being displaced and thinking about the decisions they made and what does it mean to have nostalgia for their food, for their cooking, for their love. I guess the question is it, what does it mean to ethically take it up the past?

[00:26:26] Mythri Jegathesan: What happens when we come upon something in that process that is violent or painful for others, what do we then do? So it's another decision. So I see it as these strings of decisions. I recently wrote about my mother's fish cutlets, and right now there's this awful food shortage and people don't have enough money to cook it in the oil.

[00:26:47] Mythri Jegathesan: There's no oil to cook it, and no gas delivers to heat up the oil. Right? So I was thinking sometimes our nostalgia is too violent to stomach. Our desires for those memories and it's too violent. And then what do we do with that? So [00:27:00] do we hold off? Or is it a form of disciplining ourselves, but also thinking more ethically about the nostalgia at work?

[00:27:07] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: There is no easy way to navigate personal nostalgia. It is a constant conversation that has many sticking points. I like this outlook that Mythri has to think ethically about nostalgia and to know that as a decision we make and therefore to have intent with that decision. We need to re-look at our pasts and to really see where the harm and violence comes when we indulge in nostalgia so that we don't continue to perpetuate inequality, so we don't see the colonial past with romance, but for the destructive systems and structures they created. 

[00:27:51] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: But there is also joy in our pasts, and reacquainting ourselves with those places and spaces. When we do make [00:28:00] the decision to indulge in nostalgia, to pick moments of nostalgic joy and share them with those we care about, our communities.

[00:28:08] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: We are able to create new shared spaces and build new narratives.

[00:28:22] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you so much for listening to episode nine of Taste of Place. Thank you to my wonderful guests, Shiraz Bayjoo, Zolitha ​​Magengelele, and Mythri Jegathesan. I'd like to thank my producer katherine. Audio editor, Diana Pong researcher, Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choy. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder Steven Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective executive producer, Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, music director Catherine [00:29:00] Yang, managing producer Marvin Yueh, associate producer, Quentin Lebeau, production coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, production Assistant Maha Sanad and publicist, Melissa Haughton. The music created by Catherine Yang and Cover Art created by Whetstone Art Director Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, on TikTok @WhetstoneMedia and subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel, Whetstone Media for more podcast content. You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone, at WhetstoneMedia.com.