A Journey Into the Wild, Aching Heart of America

NUSRAT ON THE ROAD IN AMERICA.
Starting April 7, 2019 Nusrat is on the road in the American heartland visiting small towns, meeting ordinary people to bring their stories to the rest of country and the world.

Jackson, Mississippi

After more than two years of traveling the world and reacquainting myself with its people, its beauty and madness, I am making a trip into the heartland to discover firsthand what is happening in our own country, to our own people, in these strange and turbulent times. The idea is to gather stories that are untold, from people you never see or hear from, into the obscure and unknown cities of the USA few of us in New York or LA or Chicago or DC ever visit. From Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa in Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi, (where I am now) to Memphis, to Little Rock, Arkansas and then small towns of the North and then the South again and East and West.

I am leading a band of intrepid filmmakers, podcasters, writers and photographers, as hell-bent as I am to scavenge for the truth, to find the lost songs, the weird magic, the sweet humanity of this country. Who are we now? Where does it hurt? How do the rest of us live? What do we collectively hope for? Who are the real heroes of our country? What do we dream of in secret? How do we recover from heartbreak in our small bedrooms? What makes us laugh? Did we lose it all? Can we find the lost chord?

While the New York Times, USA Today, Facebook, Netflix and Google reverberate and echo and boom with the Big Stories of the day, we are visiting the faceless and unknown in small towns to hopefully bring them into the light. The laconic river keepers on Black Warrior river fighting big business dumping toxins into our waters; the elderly lady ranchers of Montana; the fiery black activists in the poorest county in Alabama; the born-again ex-convict recovering drug-addict barber bringing hope to Greensboro, the broken-hearted losers who survived it all and saved their communities; the immigrants who built entire churches and hospitals; a death-row prisoner who got a reprieve and found love; dozens of human-scale stories. This morning I drove on Bob Dylan’s gorgeous Highway 61…. and I saw that the vultures I scattered along the way were feasting on the irony of it all: one of the most beautiful places in the USA is also one the poorest and most segregated and torn apart by race and disparity, and yet its people received me with love and pride and barely a complaint about their lot.

It doesn’t help to start a trip like this with a massive jolt of pain, but the road heals. Listening to people’s stories of heartbreak and loss and redemption and beauty and joy helps you heal. I’ll be gone for a while, but I hope to post snippets of my trip on FB and Instagram when I can. Text me, 'cause I'll be lonely and listening to old country music in the car. Eventually the films and photos and podcasts will find their way into the world over the coming months on various platforms and on my website and in talks.