28.2.07
23.2.07
Currently reading...
I recently purchased a beautiful volume of essays edited by Amitava Kumar, Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate. Included are essays and selections from the writings of M.K. Gandhi, Amitav Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, A.K. Ramanujan, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Anita Desai, and Pankaj Mishra, among others. Highly recommended.
Below is an extract from Bharati Mukherjee's brilliant piece, "Two Ways to Belong in America."
Like well-raised sisters, we never said what was really on our minds, but we probably pitied one another. She, for the lack of structure in my life, the erasure of Indianness, the absence of an unvarying daily core. I, for the narrowness of her perspective, her uninvolvement with the mythic depths or the superficial pop culture of this society. But, now, with the apegoating of ‘aliens’ (documented and illegal) on the increase, and the targeting of long-term legal immigrants like Mira for new scrutiny and new self-consciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to maintain the same polite discretion. We were always unacknowledged adversaries, and we are now, more than ever, sisters.
“I feel used,” Mira raged on the phone the other night. “I feel manipulated and discarded. This is such an unfair way to treat a person who was invited to stay and work here because of her talent. My employer went to the INS and petitioned for the labour certification…I’ve obeyed all the rules, I’ve paid my taxes, I love my work…I love the friends I’ve made. How dare America change its rules in midstream? If America wants to make new rules curtailing benefits of legal immigrants, they should only apply to immigrants who arrive after those rules are already in place.”
To my ears, it sounded like the description of a long-enduring, comfortable yet loveless marriage, without risk or recklessness. Have we the right to demand, and to expect, that we be loved? (That, to me, is the subtext of the arguments by immigration advocates.) My sister is an expatriate, professionally generous and creative, socially courteous and gracious, and that’s as far as her Americanization can go. She is here to maintain an identity, not to transform it.
...
Mira and I differ, however, in the ways in which we hope to interact with the country that we have chosen to live in. She is happier to live in America as expatriate Indian than as an immigrant American. I need to be part of the community I have adopted…I need to put roots down, to vote and make the difference that I can. The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation.
Comments?
20.2.07
Currently reading...
Again, Zadie Smith; again, White Teeth:
We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Shout out to Imin Yeh.
Comments?
We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Shout out to Imin Yeh.
Comments?
14.2.07
Years too late.
Ever behind the times, I am currently reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth. Standard reactions being had: the book is brilliant; Smith is wise beyond her 30-odd years (White Teeth was published when she was just 24).
Most fascinating to me, though, is Smith's useful critique of multiculturalism, the commodification of culture and beauty, and the skewed histories of colonialism that continue to reach well beyond South Asian borderlines. In short, White Teeth is an intensely theoretical novel. We no longer need to search for narratives on which to superimpose our disembodied theories. Smith has done it for us: here is a narrative written of the theory, of the body--concisely, eloquently, organically.
To set up the passage below: Millat, the UK-born son of a Bangladeshi Muslim, reacts to the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Notice how Smith delineates the complexities and interactions between the postcolonial, the migrant, and the diasporic, all in the last few phrases:
To be more precise, Millat hadn’t read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book; could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of others; could not pick out the writer in a lineup of other writers (irresistible, this lineup of offending writers: Socrates, Protagoras, Ovid and Juvenal, Radclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, D.H. Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, all holding up their numbers for the mug shot, squinting in the flashbulb). But he knew other things. He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in this country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands.
Comments?
13.2.07
6.2.07
Queer Stuffs
Nepal has granted citizenship to a transwoman. Chanda Mausalman was issued official citizenship papers in which the gender M/F option was crossed out, replaced by the word "both."
Below are two links on the story. The first is from Advocate.com, the second from Yahoo-India News.
http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid41771.asp
http://in.news.yahoo.com/070205/43/6bsxc.html
Below are two links on the story. The first is from Advocate.com, the second from Yahoo-India News.
http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid41771.asp
http://in.news.yahoo.com/070205/43/6bsxc.html
Currently reading...
From Sarah Waters' The Night Watch:
The house was perfectly dark after that, and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse than ever. She had only to reach for the switch of the lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place, but she couldn’t do it; she was quite cut off from ordinary habits and things. She sat a little longer, then got up and began to pace. The pacing was like something an actress might do in a play, to communicate a state of despair or dementedness, and didn’t feel real. She got down on the floor, drew up her legs, put her arms before her face: this pose didn’t feel real, either, but she held it, for almost twenty minutes. Perhaps Julia will come down and see me lying on the floor, she thought, as she lay there; she thought that if Julia did that, then she would at least realize the extremity of the feeling by which she, Helen, was gripped.
Then she saw at last that she would only look absurd. She got up. She was chilled, and cramped. She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at your face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street-lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white, as if in little weals, from where she’d lain upon the carpet. The marks were satisfying, at least. She’d often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she’d sometimes thought, in moments like this, I’ll burn myself, or I’ll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem. I won’t be doing it, she said to herself, like some hysterical girl. I won’t be doing it for Julia, hoping she’ll come and catch me at it...I’ll be doing it for myself, as a secret.
...
She proceeded, now, as if she’d planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the neck of the sponge-bag and drew out the slim chromium case that held the safety-razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She took the razor out, unwound its screw, lifted off the little hub of metal, and eased out the blade.
...
She was left with two short crimson lines, such as might have been made by a hard but playful swipe from the paw of a cat.
She sat down on the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some change in her, some chemical change: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed, alive and chastened. She’d lost the certainty that the cutting of her leg was a sane and reasonable thing to do...And, yet— She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half-perplexed, half-admiring way. You perfect fool, she thought; but she thought it almost jauntily. At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its metal hub, and put the razor back in its case. She switched off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall and went up to the bedroom.
The house was perfectly dark after that, and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse than ever. She had only to reach for the switch of the lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place, but she couldn’t do it; she was quite cut off from ordinary habits and things. She sat a little longer, then got up and began to pace. The pacing was like something an actress might do in a play, to communicate a state of despair or dementedness, and didn’t feel real. She got down on the floor, drew up her legs, put her arms before her face: this pose didn’t feel real, either, but she held it, for almost twenty minutes. Perhaps Julia will come down and see me lying on the floor, she thought, as she lay there; she thought that if Julia did that, then she would at least realize the extremity of the feeling by which she, Helen, was gripped.
Then she saw at last that she would only look absurd. She got up. She was chilled, and cramped. She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at your face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street-lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white, as if in little weals, from where she’d lain upon the carpet. The marks were satisfying, at least. She’d often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she’d sometimes thought, in moments like this, I’ll burn myself, or I’ll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem. I won’t be doing it, she said to herself, like some hysterical girl. I won’t be doing it for Julia, hoping she’ll come and catch me at it...I’ll be doing it for myself, as a secret.
...
She proceeded, now, as if she’d planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the neck of the sponge-bag and drew out the slim chromium case that held the safety-razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She took the razor out, unwound its screw, lifted off the little hub of metal, and eased out the blade.
...
She was left with two short crimson lines, such as might have been made by a hard but playful swipe from the paw of a cat.
She sat down on the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some change in her, some chemical change: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed, alive and chastened. She’d lost the certainty that the cutting of her leg was a sane and reasonable thing to do...And, yet— She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half-perplexed, half-admiring way. You perfect fool, she thought; but she thought it almost jauntily. At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its metal hub, and put the razor back in its case. She switched off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall and went up to the bedroom.
5.2.07
Mira Nair + Jhumpa Lahiri + Irfan Khan + Tabu = Yes, please!
Here is the trailer for Mira's Nair's adaptation of The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. This is the movie to watch for in 2007.
Namaste/Namaskara/Hello
Dearest Reader,
Welcome to Bag Ladies & Black Tea, a brand new blog by a co-founder of the PLAN 2008 diversity triumvirate. This space will function mainly as a journal of my reading habits--look out for emotionally resonant quotations, politically charged idea-thinking, and vitally important social commentary. Keywords to consider include the following: diaspora, queer, feminist, brown, south asia, grad school, indian cinema, bestie, imin, diana, justine.
Very best wishes, and happy reading.
a.kini
Welcome to Bag Ladies & Black Tea, a brand new blog by a co-founder of the PLAN 2008 diversity triumvirate. This space will function mainly as a journal of my reading habits--look out for emotionally resonant quotations, politically charged idea-thinking, and vitally important social commentary. Keywords to consider include the following: diaspora, queer, feminist, brown, south asia, grad school, indian cinema, bestie, imin, diana, justine.
Very best wishes, and happy reading.
a.kini
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