After a long break, Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of New York City, will have a First Lady.
While Zohran Mamdani, a liberal, progressive, and leftist, creates history as the youngest Mayor of New York City, some attention is focused on his better half, Ruma Duwaji, a Syrian-American artist and illustrator. Duwaji, who was based in Dubai, moved to the US only in 2021 and married Mamdani in a City Hall ceremony this year.
Though Mamdani was thrust into the limelight after he embarked on a brilliant campaign for the office, Duwaji had kept a low profile, and not much was known about her until Mamdani himself decided to respond to a conspiracy theory that he, being a Muslim, was hiding his wife. Mamdani took to Instagram to post her picture, stating: “Three months ago, I married the love of my life, Rama, at the City Clerk’s office.”
Though born in Houston, Duwaji spent her early life in Dubai after her family shifted to the city, close to their home country. But the artist confessed to how she always attempted to deny her Syrian roots while growing up. “I used to kind of deny the Syrian part of me, and used to tell people that I was American when I was like nine, or like 12, maybe, -ish, because it was like a very cool thing,” she told a podcast, Tavan Studio, in 2019.
She moved back to the US while at university. She enrolled at the Qatar campus of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts but later transferred in her second year to the main campus in Richmond, Virginia. It was only that she “realised her difference or how she didn’t fit in well”. “Then I started making work about identity, what it means to be Syrian abroad, and kind of just delved into these topics that really meant a lot to me,” she added.
By 2021, she moved to New York, where she met Mamdani.
Duwaji has also been very vocal about her anti-Israel stance, including in her work. She had done an illustration on “the environmental warfare Israel has been doing on Palestinian farmers and their crops,” declaring on Instagram: “Presidents come and go, but American imperialism never changes.
She has also worked on a short film about a mother in Gaza forced to move with her children over and over again.