Irresistible Revolution

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Part IV: Guinevere, Racism and the Tyranny of Beauty

2012-01-13T09:44:00.000-08:00

I'm a fangirl. Always have been and, I suspect, always will be. Being a fangirl means (among giggling, obsessive Tumblring and overall silliness) that I allow myself to become immersed in cultural texts in ways that are both insightful and transformative. As I said in a previous post, the reason I'm able to thoughtfully critique culture is because I unabashedly engage it; it's precisely because of my passion for art and culture that I so strongly oppose it's complicity in systems of oppression.

Art and culture are not 'just entertainment': they are powerful tools with which we understand, contextualize and justify the world we live in. Being a fangirl means that I invariably encounter cultural texts that justify sexism. Being a fangirl of color means....a whole lot more.

I've written before about my love for the BBC show 'Merlin', particularly due to the casting of WOC actress Angel Coulby in the role of Guinevere. The show has many problematic elements, as do all cultural texts, but I keep returning to it because it's one of the few media images of a woman of color, especially a Black woman, as beautiful, sweet, desirable, gracious, queenly. Angel Coulby is the reason I watch this show, and the reason I partake in its fandom. It's been years since I've participated in a fandom; the unquestioned racism of Tolkien fandoms drove me away, and the predominant whiteness of so many fantasy texts curtail my ability to empathize with the stories being told. In short, 'Merlin', even with its many pitfalls, is a breath of fresh air, and has reminded of all the reasons I love being a fangirl.

While Angel Coulby as Gwen boasts a devoted fanbase, there are many who virulently dislike her role as future queen; examining some of the reasons cited by those who dislike her, while painful and quite frankly nauseating, help illustrate how deeply white supremacy is embedded in our cultural landscape, and how much decolonizing we still need to do.

I won't go into all the whitesplaining reasons in this post: many other Merlin fans of color have done so superbly. What I'm interested in discussing here is the the question of beauty, and how our cultural definitions of 'beautiful' are interwoven with the stories we tell.

Many (usually white) contend that they have no issue whatsoever with Angel Coulby being Black, rather they insist their dislike is based on purely aesthetic reasons. Some of the comments on YouTube videos can be summarized thus: "it's not her race, I just don't find her attractive enough to play the part. It's not racist! It's my opinion."

I try and understand how some people could simply find her unattractive. Then I look at pictures like this:

Or this:

Clearly, this is a striking woman. Whatever your 'subjective' tastes, it's hard to look at these pictures and unequivocally deem her lacking in the looks department.

Beauty, desire and attraction maybe subjective, but 450 plus years of cultural conditioning that elevated Eurocentric beauty standards over all others has left an indelible mark on our collective conscious. We are all implicated in the colonial, white-supremacist gaze. There's a reason that my teenage self could never picture a Black/African descended man as a Prince. There's a reason that same teenage self unthinkingly coded beauty as white. And there's a reason why women like Angel Coulby are considered ''simply unattractive' while the Kristen Stewarts and Anna Paquins of the world are presented time and again in on-screen roles where their beauty and allure are simply assumed.

I'm not interested in typecasting anyone who disagrees with Coulby's casting as racist (such oversimplified conclusions belie the depth to which racism is embedded in our culture). What I do wish to point out, is that our subjective desires are never innocent, and that they are developed in a context of interaction with a world that is racist, sexist, cis-supremacist and euro-centric. How many images have we, as a culture, been subjected to wherein a white woman was framed as the ultimate object of beauty? In visual media alone I can easily think of 10 off the top of my head, and that's not even scratching the surface. Scarlett O'Hara, Cleopatra, Christine Daae, Snow White, Arwen Evenstar are but a few: in each case, a white, European-descended woman is framed, lit, dressed, posed, highlighted and presented as the ultimate embodiment of beauty. This isn't just happenstance: filmic devices such as camera angles, lighting, makeup and costuming are all employed to create the maximum effect, and coupled with the reality of a world where white equals power, it's easy to accept and internalize a singular standard of beauty against which all others must compare. Anyone who claims to have escaped the effect of these images is engaging in patent dishonesty. I'm affected by these images, and I'm someone who spends every day trying to decolonize my cultural perspectives.

Someone else who commented on my Guinevere post said this:

"I have no problem with them casting a black woman as Guinevere, but as an artist, my problem is that Guinevere's beauty was legendary (which led to her subsequent "man troubles") and although I find Angel Coulby cute and pretty, she is not captivatingly beautiful!But a huge part of Guinevere's character is her physical beauty (not skin colour!) and that's why I personally feel this particular casting failed, as much as I appreciate the actress' ability."

That line " Guinevere's beauty was legendary", has rankled me since I saw that comment. Who gets to decide what is and isn't 'legendary'? Aren't codified legends, ultimately, tales that are allowed to flourish because they benefit the status quo? Why do we accept, without question, that all heroes and heroines were physically attractive and why does this seem integral to our cultural capacity to picture those people? The necessity of beauty is particularly insistent for women of myth: Helen of Troy, Guinevere, Cleopatra were all women closely tied to the power-base of history's most renowned empires, and yet whenever we remember them through books, movies or poetry it is their beauty that becomes paramount. We cite Helen as

"the face that launched a thousand ships", we speculate that Cleopatra deployed her sexual allure to control Julius Cesar and Mark Anthony, and we love to vilify Guinevere as the beauty who compelled Lancelot to surrender "all his worldly worth" and thus ensure the ruination of Camelot. By reducing these historical figures to their beauty, we not only do profound disservice to a history of powerful women, but we also perpetuate narrow understandings of sexuality, desirability, race and gender.

When we imagine the noble and heroic figures of myth, we shape them according to our own aspirations: we want to feel admiration and empathy, we want to adore them and we want to believe we could be them. In a society where physical appearance is tied to historic systems of power and privilege, it's no wonder we assign beauty to heroic virtue and vice versa. But this cultural association spells real consequences: it's intertwined with legacies of racist colonialism that devalues certain kinds of physical beauty, and the the ravages of disordered eating, unhealthy body image, depression and food addiction are attributable to a cultural fetish for "perfect" beauty.

Furthermore, these ideas of women's beauty as somehow a force of its own also feeds into the myths of rape culture: women's bodies are not our own, rather they're public, cultural objects that we can possess, violate, mark and control. It might sound tragically lovely and poetic to say Helen's beauty ignited the Trojan war or that Guinevere's loveliness would prompt the noblest Knight to throw away a lifetime of vows for a single kiss; strip these memes of their poetic embellishments and it's not so different than saying a rape survivor 'asked for it' because of her appearance, or that men can't help but harass women on the streets because of our overwhelming attractiveness, or any number of misogynist excuses that endorse violent control of women.

I delight in beauty; all sentient creatures do. And I admit that the reason I love Angel Coulby's Guinevere is because I can see an image of myself reflected back to me, which is rare for a woman of color. It's rare to see thick curly hair, honey-deep skin and dark eyes on screen: even rarer to find these traits centered as beautiful. I wonder how my childhood/teenage imaginings would have differed if I had seen images of WOC celebrated as beautiful all around me. I worry about any children I might have, growing up without seeing their skin and hair and eyes celebrated as beautiful. I know many parents of color who struggle with this already.

Beauty and its sensual discernment is powerful: but unless we decode the centuries of meaning embedded within its definition, then we are only constructing an ideal that controls and disciplines our marvelous human potential. We use beauty to police which women we listen to, which women we consider 'real' women, which women we recognize, and which women are 'unrapeable'. Decolonizing our concept of beauty, and disrupting its cultural connection to worthiness, would mean our cultural myths would also have to shift. They would no longer include only the rich and powerful, the white and able-bodied, the heterosexual and cis-gendered. They would include women of color, transwomen, transmen, differently abled bodies.

I think the CrimethInc. Ex. Workers’ Collective says it best: "Beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. To see beauty is simply to learn the private language of meaning which is another’s life–to recognize and relish what is."

Bella Swan and the Pitfalls of Desire

2011-12-14T12:51:00.000-08:00

**mild spoilers for 'Breaking Dawn, Part I'**

Bella Swan haunts me. Ever since I watched "Breaking Dawn: Part I" two weeks ago, she flickers at the edge of my consciousness, both beckoning and insidious, like a succubus ghost from a Japanese horror story. For a long time I avoided the Twilight phenomenon; when the books and movies were gaining cultural momentum, I was divesting myself of a harmful relationship and grappling with the realities of sexualized, genderized racism at college and thus had no interest in a what I perceived as a pseudo-feminist modern day white fairytale that was inculcating a whole new generation of girls with patriarchal ideas of love and romance. I simply couldn't understand why I should.

But desire is a tricky thing. Like that beckoning ghost, it occupies spaces in our psyche that frighten us, even as they sway us with their power. And Twilight, ultimately, is so wildly popular because it holds desire in the palm of its hand like a promising red apple, proffering its delightful sweetness to anyone who dares to bite. The saga would have us believe that desire is visceral, natural, uncontrollable and innate: like Edward and Bella's passionate attraction, it simply is. But desire is also constructed, historicized and politically significant; it doesn't spring from a pure psychic source, rather it emerges out of the perplexing, delightful and sometimes frightening interplay between our physical and psychological propensities and the socio-culture of the world we inhabit.

I watched 'Breaking Dawn' because I wanted to understand why this vampiric romance was so desirable, to so many. And because I knew, that if i had been fifteen when the books came out, I probably would have been as enthralled as any Twi-hard today. I wanted to open myself to the possibility of being enthralled, once again, by a narrative I had long since rejected. I didn't want to be an 'objective' outsider, coldly dissecting the Twilight phenomenon while evincing barely concealed distaste for Twi-fans. I love cultural analysis because I love culture; the reason I engage critically with cultural phenomena is because of my lifelong immersion in that phenomena. I reject the notion that such immersion precludes the possibility for critical thinking. In fact, I think much of the scorn and dismissal of 'Twilight' and its fandom emerges out of a misogynistic tradition that devalues female-embodied experience as disgusting/ridiculous. So two days after Thanksgiving, I headed to the theater and purchased my ticket.

Firstly, I was surprised. I was surprised that there were parts of the film I actually found moving, that touched me and effected me. The honeymoon sequence was somewhat endearing, and it was refreshing to see them as playful and affectionate rather than their standard epic angst. But for most of the movie, my empathy with Bella were intertwined with sadness and a recoiling fear. To be sure, the wedding sequence is beautifully rendered: the flowers, the music, the ethereal wedding dress, juxtaposed with Bella's timid nervousness, was quite emotionally resonant for me. Bella's emotiveness in general, admittedly exaggerated at times, struck a chord with me as someone who once evinced such emotiveness myself.

I've written several posts about my relationship to literature and fantasy, and how that relationship was shaped by racism and colonialism: specifically, I've discussed how the wilting flower Princess/ angel/ damsel role, while marketed to all girls, is circumscribed by whiteness and predicated upon the colonial image of white femininity as the pure and virtuous antithesis of Brown female sexuality. The power of the damsel/ Princess image, for me, has always been wrapped up in the longing to be desired, which is subsequently wrapped up in my performance of hetero-femininity. Bella Swan then, is an updated, refashioned version of the classic White princess: helpless, fragile and fiercely protected by the men who also desire her with a violence-laced passion. This was what my fantasies were built on as a teenager, fantasies I had to painfully repudiate as I learned the realities of racialized sexism.

Watching Bella onscreen, slender and trembling in bridal lace, bending sapling-like under Edward's touch, fearful and perplexed, and finally emaciated with pregnancy, I had the odd sensation that I was watching a pastiche of my teenage fantasies resurrected in Kristin Stewart's pale, helpless form. I was transfixed with the same shocked and fascinated horror that I imagine takes hold of characters in zombie movies as they witness a former lover/friend/family member awaken as one of the Undead. Corpse brides analogies aside, I was seduced by the beauty of Bella's sensually Victorian wedding dress and the power of helpless desire, while simultaneously recoiling from the very effect of that beauty. Bella's nightmare on the eve of her wedding, wherein she arrives at the altar as a lace-clad bride only to find herself atop a mountain of corpses, her perfect dress soiled with blood and facing the cold gaze of the Volturi, is metaphorically powerful for a number of reasons, not only by offering a rare glimpse into the potentially dire consequences of Bella's choice of husband, but also (to me) hinting the dark underside of Bella's eagerly chosen destiny of patriarchal, white womanhood: disillusionment, violence, fear, and blood. While Bella is ultimately protected and revered by Edward, my heart ached for all the young girls, Brown and white, who grow up imagining that such protection might one day be theirs, only to have the world teach them otherwise.

I'm still untangling what the Twilight saga means, both personally and socioculturally, but for now I keep returning to its proffering of desire. Heterosexual femininity is encouraged towards narcissism, towards an obsessive fixation on itself, to self-objectify our bodies and desires, to constantly seek the heterosexual male gaze. But the majority of heterosexual women are not thin, white and able-bodied, and unlike Bella our shyness/social awkwardness is rarely construed as endearing or charming by the Edwards of the world. The power of Meyer's story lies in this: it offers vast swathes of young women an opportunity to see their socially-conditioned, yet rarely fulfilled, desires enacted: the desire to evoke passion, to be protected, to be handled and treasured by powerful men, to have our bodies beautified through martyrdom, sacrifice and helplessness. Many years since my own teenage fantasies, happily married to a partner who regards and treats me as an equal, I can still acknowledge the power those desires once held over me, and their continued power in our corporate landscape of perfect (white) bodies and frothy white weddings. I would be lying if I denied that those lace-and-lily desires did not, still, touch me with ghostly longing, if only through a bittersweet nostalgia for the innocence of my teenage years. When there are so few cultural outlets that validate young female desire, how do we begin to discuss the limitations and pitfalls of Bella's narrative? How do we engage with those young women whose desires and bodies fall outside of that narrative, and are therefore ignored or stigmatized?

Desire is powerful. It also humbles us, and leaves us vulnerable to those who would promise its fulfillment while exploiting us for their own gain. And until all young women are afforded the space and opportunity to really engage their desires, without shame or ridicule, and until we stop uncritically fetishisizing their submission to powerful men, pale Bella Swann will continue, I think, to haunt me.

***Corpse Bride image courtesy of http://www.halloweenblogonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Corpse-Bride-Costume-Makeup.jpg***

The Politics of Eating Part I: Food, Love, History and Thanksgiving

2011-11-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

"eating a $5 plate of string hoppers, I think of my father"

snoozing in front of Seinfeld on the beige on beige recliner
his belly folds after years
of american chop suey, hamburgers and Michelob
Nothing
he really wanted to eat
was ever on the shelves
of Iandolli's or the Big D
I think of that man
who cried three times in my life
once when appamma died
once when our dog died
& once when I sent him
a 99-cent package of tamarind candy
& he called me long distance after Ma went to bed
weeping from tasting tamarind
for the first time in thirty years"
By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

It seems fitting that I felt compelled to write this post as we in the US head towards the dubiously named "Thanksgiving" holiday. At perhaps no other time (except maybe Christmas) is it more awkward, frustrating and painful to be a Brown vegetarian in the Upper Midwest (considering the generally awkward, frustrating and painful condition of being a vegetarian of color here, that's saying a lot).
I was a vegetarian for ten years before I arrived in the US, and yet I was completely unprepared for how my eating habits would mark me as even more Other than I already was. I spent a year and a half paying an exorbitant amount for on-campus dining facilities that expected vegetarians to subsist on grilled cheese, salad and pizza, with the occasional veggie burger thrown in. Being able to cook my own food made a world of difference, but this still didn't ease the inevitable awkwardness of group meals and outings, wherein I would have to endure ignorant comments and snide remarks about my vegetarianism.

The intersections of racism and food are nothing new to POC, although White folks continue to profess ignorance when the topic is broached. When so much of our consumption of food is cloaked in false adveritising, driven by a relentless profit motive and steeped in histories of colonialism and land theft, it's no wonder that those in power wish to obfuscate the truth. The Thanksgiving holiday for example, neatly covers up an ugly history of genocide by putting a Hallmark spin on a historical moment: instead of learning about Indigenous farming practices and communities (which were maintained sustainably for hundreds of years prior to European intervention), nor how European colonialism systematically stripped Indigenous populations of their lands and resources, we get a fairytale about the Pilgrims and the Indians sitting down over a Fall feast.
Multinational food and biotech corporations continue to cocoon us in a myth about 'advanced' farming practices and biotechnologies, while ignoring the devastation that monocropping wreaks on the land, copyrighting seeds and genes to increase their profit, and supplanting hundreds of years of localized, sustainable food productivity in Third World nations with large-scale monocropping that lines the pockets of CEO's and leaves communities, literally, starving. The next time you see one of those ubiquitous pictures of Poor Starving Brown Children in the big bad scary Third World, instead of spending 50$ on a pair of Toms to appease your guilty conscience, take a long hard look at your food consumption: do you know where your fruits and vegetables come from? Who picked them? Whose land it was planted on? Do you know where the myths about eating lots of meat and drinking tons of cow's milk comes from? Are you truly aware of the forces shaping your eating habits?

The scorn and derision directed at vegetarians, in the Midwest in particular and in the US in general, comes directly from a colonialist history that constructed excessive meat and dairy consumption as a signifier of wealth, power and thereby superiority. By fashioning their consumption habits as superior, Europeans bequeathed themselves the prerogative to usurp Indigenous lands, overrun POC cultures and destroy sustainable, localized farming practices. People like to think that vegetarians are single-handedly out to destroy the American farm, but the American farm as we romanticize it no longer exists. We can no longer meet the producers of our food face to face, shake their hands as we purchase vegetables harvested on their land, build a communal relationship based on trust and mutuality. Instead, both producer and consumer answer to the corporations, the bloated middle-men who aggressively control what, where and how much farmers grow, and then adulterate those products to squeeze every last bit of profit they can out of the consumers. Meanwhile, heart disease, high-blood pressure and diabetes rates are soaring, more people than ever are struggling with disordered and/or emotional eating, the ingredients list on our food-boxes read like chemistry experiments, the media tells us to blame the fat people, and no one has a freaking clue how we got here or what we should do.

Over the last six months, I've transitioned to clean eating: high consumption of locally grown vegetables and fruits (or as close to local as I can get them), getting protein and fat from clean sources like nuts, Greek yoghurt and beans, and absolutely no high fructose corn syrup. This means that I have to make almost everything I eat from scratch, including bread and tortillas. While I still have a ways to go in divesting myself of emotional/disordered eating, for the first time in my life I feel in control of my food: the difference is like going from a controlling, manipulative relationship to one of trust and healthy emotional connection. As a Third World woman, this is going back to my roots. This is eating the way my grandmothers ate, and still eat. Cuisine from Thailand, Sri Lanka and India naturally lends itself to a healthy, sustainable diet because for hundreds of years, our staples were vegetables, fruits, grains, locally caught fish and locally grown rice. Our food takes love and dedication to prepare, and it pleasures the senses while also nourishing the body and soul. In this, as in much else, the so called First World stands to learn a great deal from the people they've spent centuries exterminating, subjugating and erasing.

The awkwardness and scorn I've experienced while dining in the company of white Westerners, comes out of a specific history of colonialist capitalism that continues to shape our relationship to food. By pitting farmers against vegetarians, producers against consumers, White, Scandinavian meat n'potatoes folk against Brown, rice n'curry people, corporations continue to exploit our broken relationship to food, reaping profits while we're left floundering in a morass of ignorance and confusion. While corporate profits skyrocket and food monopolies creep across the globe, many of us are left deliberately unaware of the tools and knowledge with which to implement meaningful change at the most basic level of existence: what we put into our bodies. Instead of reaching out to our communities and fostering dialogue among different types of eaters, we've been lied to and manipulated to mistrust each other. We've been extorted to invest more faith in Got Milk type campaigns than in the ancestral, ethnocultural knowledge that all of us, POC and White, can find in our family history.

So, as we head into Turkey Day, I'm going to share some practices that I'm trying to honor, and maybe, just maybe, we can start reconnecting with our histories, our communities, and our bodies.

First of all, educate yourself about the land you live on, learn about who lived there before you, about whose communities were uprooted to make room for yours. Learn and stand witness to a history of violent dispossession that Indigenous people continue to struggle against and survive and flourish in spite of. This isn't about wallowing in guilt: we have a responsibility to learn the history of the land we live on, the real and complex history, not just the one that makes us feel good about ourselves. This is about acknowledging our debt to history, and making a commitment to a different, more just future.

Talk to the elders in your family, ask them how (and if) they celebrated the holiday. What did they cook and how? What unique recipes have been supplanted by the standard pecan pie and sweet potatoes? Make some knephla from scratch. Try your hand at baking some bread. Don't be afraid to change the menu. Food is knowledge we can literally touch and taste. Think about that: what knowledge are we sharing with our loved ones, what knowledge are we taking in, and what are we leaving out?

If you're inviting newer people for dinner, call ahead and ask them if they have any allergies, aversions or dietary requirements. If they're vegetarian or gluten-intolerant, don't be afraid to say: "You know, I don't know a lot about that, could you tell me a little bit about what you like eating so I can make something for you?" Don't be afraid to make a meat-free or almost meat-free meal once in a while: remember, thousands of people have been eating vegetarian for centuries, so there's nothing 'lacking' about a meal where meat isn't the main course. Don't expect everyone eats the same things as you, and that your vegetarian/vegan/ non-gluten friends should just accommodate themselves to bread and lettuce while everyone else at the table chows down on a 5 course meal. Food is also a maker of inclusion and community: the food you serve says a great deal about who's welcome at your table, and who isn't.

Honor and appreciate the women in your family. Studies have shown that women's domestic labor quadruples during the Holidays to include extra cooking, purchasing gifts, sending cards, wrapping gifts, and more cooking. Look around to see if your mum, aunt, wife, partner, sister needs help. Creating a meal together is a very basic act of love, don't hesitate to share in it, and to appreciate the labor behind it.

And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, go back to your roots. Look them up. Be they Irish, German, Norwegian, Peruvian, Sri Lankan, Indian, Filipina, Ojibwe. Bring some of that old-time flavor back into your dishes, make your kitchen smell like your grandma's. Excavate that familial knowledge of food the corporations would like us to forget. Use food as a literal connection to your family and communal history, and seek to understand how others do the same. Our histories are as multitudinous as our various cuisines, so remember that difference doesn't mean less than you, but rather an opportunity to learn, to deepen your perspective.
Look outside the kitchen in Woman's Day magazine, to the hands and hearts of the generations that came, labored, ate and loved before us.

The revolution begins at your table. I promise you, it'll be worth it.

**Posters are by the amazing Favianna Rodriguez

When I Stop Asking for my Rights

2011-10-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

**To those who think international students of color have no business demanding rights in the US**

I'll stop demanding my rights,

When I can open the history books and see my people's faces

When I can turn on the TV and see them as humans, not caricatures

When you stop complimenting me on my English like you're doing me a goddamn favor

(Who the hell are you to ascribe yourself the importance of evaluating my language skills?

I've been reading Shakespeare on my own since I was 14 and I can out-write you and yours

any damn day of the week).

I'll "stop complaining"

When international students are treated as human beings

When we can work to support ourselves through college

When we can speak our languages without you complaining

When you step out of your privileged bubble and acknowledge that the REST OF THE WORLD has accents, and no, they do not make us stupider or less developed than you. WE are bi, tri and multi-lingual, while YOU complain if someone sounds even slightly different than you when speaking the same damn language. Still think we're the backward ones?

I'll quit speaking up

When you acknowledge my people's contributions you so eagerly gobble up

Like yoga,

Like spicy, nourishing food.

Like Buddhism.

Like turquoise and magenta on silk saris

Like henna.

I'll "go back" and "get out"

As soon as you pull out the corporations from our countries that employ (exploit) my people for sub-human wages to make your sport-shoes and your jeans

As soon as you pack up your military bases

As soon as you return the 400 plus years of wealth and resources plundered from our nations

As soon as you give me back the fluency in my mother's language I sacrificed for fluency in yours, just so I could have a better chance in the world.

I'll stop demanding my rights

When my passport grants me hassle-free travel to any part of the world I choose

When my face and skin are hair are advertised as beautiful

When I can get married without your government breathing down my neck

When I can get married at all

When I don't have to fight for my people's representation in schoolbooks and classrooms

When I don't have to counter lies, myths and denial of my people's humanity every single day.

So, yes, I'll stop demanding

When my rights

my people's rights

Everywhere around the whole freaking world

Are as guaranteed

As yours.

The Jasmine Diaries, Part III: Beyond "Exotic"

2011-10-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

The Jasmine Diaries Part II: 'Exotic' is not a Compliment

2011-09-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

"Tell me, Maria, why I see her dancing there

Why her smoldering eyes still scorch my soul.

I feel her, I see her, the sun caught in her raven hair

It's blazing in me out of all control"

--"Hellfire" from Walt Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"

Images are one of the most powerful forms of social control. Images tell us stories about who we are, where we come from and what our place in the world is. Images narrativize and normalize history and shape our collective social conscious. In a not-so-post colonial, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal world, the images we see are often shaped by intersecting oppressions, and without critical consciousness we risk imbibing and perpetuating the lies of the oppressors.

Princess Jasmine is an image that exists at the crossroads of multiple oppressions: a Brown, Middle-Eastern/South Asian woman who is sexualized and objectified, created by the hands and imaginations of privileged white men. In the first post of this series I briefly discussed the colonial-sexual history that gave birth to Jasmine's image; this post will look at how her image, juxtaposed with the menagerie of white Disney princesses, shaped my sexual self-awareness and relationship to my body.

The white Princess is an image built off the devaluation and dehumanization of women of color, constituted in opposition to our supposed unfeminine and undesirable qualities. As WOC, we are the savages, the whores, only good for fucking, the sleeping dictionaries that exist as perks for colonizing white men, only to be tossed aside of course in favor of the elevated white women. Throughout the history of European colonization, white men have raped, abused, enslaved, used, fucked, had children with and lived off the labor and bodies of WOC, but they have never even come close to acknowledging our power, dignity and humanity.

Mainstream understandings of connotative femininity - helplessness, purity, grace, softness -are racially coded, and exist so that the majority of the world's women can be erased and exploited. White feminists often decry the influence of Disney princess images on young (white) girls, but they rarely take an intersectional approach to understand what those

images mean for WOC. It's one thing for white women to recognize and reject a falsely idealized image of themselves, but how do WOC 'reject' or 'resist' images that don't even acknowledge our existence, and that are specifically designed to oppositionally demean us?

As a young, bookish Brown girl growing up in Dubai, even though Jasmine was the closest in appearance to me, I chose to identify with the 'real' princesses, whom I implicitly knew needed to have flowing golden hair, European-style ballgowns and blue eyes. Those were the princesses universally adored, who only needed to raise their helpless white hand for a bevy of people to rush to their side. I sincerely failed to see the problem in identifying with/ fantasizing about being a white Princess. I continued to believe that as soon as I started dating, despite my skin color and ethnicity, that I would encounter a bevy of Prince-like men who would treat me like the Princess I knew I was: beautiful and kind, sensitive and delicately feminine.

I soon learned otherwise.

I learned that across all races of men, light-skin women with straight noses were valued more than I. I learned that my naturally thick, curly hair had to be chemically straightened in order to be considered beautiful. I learned that despite my social graces, my command of language, my soul-deep love for poetry, someone with blonde hair and rosy cheeks could float into a room and have men attribute those qualities to her naturally. White women who read 'post colonial literature' were viewed as worldly and graceful, whereas I was merely incomprehensible and strange. And somewhere along the way, I made an implicit choice in response to my reality: if I could not embody the demure, blonde princess, I would be her opposite. I would be Jasmine. If male attention would not rivet upon my grace and gentleness, I would command it with my sexuality. I would wear tight, cleavage-baring clothes, bare my belly whenever possible, openly talk about fucking, and vehemently deny that I wanted any of the things princesses are supposed to want: commitment, marriage, roses, a lover who would awake beside me with tenderness mingling with the dawn in his eyes.

"I've developed a theory for princesas of color. Earned privileges in a given life cycle only buy us time. The structures of subordination will get even the achievers. Those who think they might have escaped find themselves - like other princesas of color - treated just as women"

-"La Princesa" by Latina Anonima

While I had convinced myself that being Jasmine was empowering, I had no idea how quickly I had slipped into the niches created for WOC by colonial heteropatriarchy, nor that the history of colonial-sexual violence that created Jasmine was actively shaping my current reality. I had put on the harem-girl veil and the temple-dancer sari, happily embracing the attention my 'exotic' sexuality brought me, without stopping to consider how, why or by whom those images were created/distorted in the first place, and what it meant for me to embody them. It hadn't occurred to me that white heteropatriarchy regarded 'exotic' and 'respectable' as mutually exclusive categories. It hadn't occurred to me that my/Jasmine's body would always be a clandestine indulgence, an exploitable resource: I'd never considered the histories and limitations that were becoming reborn through my unreflective embodiment of Jasmine.

Believing in Disney's vision of Jasmine, their vision of me, led me to devalue and degrade my innate humanity, my beauty, my power, my complexity into a monolithic, colonial fantasy that was never about the real me to begin with. It was always about white colonial guilt and

the sexualization of conquest, and my experience being that fantasy left me deeply shaken. Even though I'm now happily engaged to a wonderful, caring, beautiful man, I will always remember feeling and being treated like I was worthless, a violable object, a fetish that must be hidden in the light of day. The lessons written on Jasmine's body will remain with me the rest of my life, because they opened my eyes to the reality of being a WOC in this world.

One of the most disturbing scenes in Disney's "Aladdin" is when Jasmine must pretend to seduce Jaffar in order to distract him. The clothing that the animators chose to put her in, complete with the shackles, are all a white, colonial wet dream. And she's the only Disney princess who's had to use her body in this way to distract someone. Then there's this scene in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" where Esmeralda is shimmying her hips and breasts and basically ends with a pole-dance sequence: a far cry from the delicate waltzes and pirouettes that Belle and Aurora dance. The simultaneous fascination and revulsion that Whiteness has for WOC bodies are unmistakeably evident in Disney's posturing of Jasmine and Esmeralda.

Oftentimes, white people think they're complimenting me by saying I look 'exotic'. They don't realize that the word 'exotic' itself is bloodstained with a history of colonial rape, or what it means for me, as a WOC, to be the exotic Other in a white supremacist world. Or white women will sigh with longing over Jasmine tropes and evince a desire to embody/consume the Other: darkening their hair, wearing black eyeliner, big earrings or saris.

They like to play at being what they think I am, what they think Jasmine is. For them, Jasmine is a an exciting adventure, a garment they can put on and take off at will. For me, she's real, she's my everyday, she walks in my skin and looks through my eyes. The degradation and violence that she endures is done to me.

The brilliant Emi Koyama once said "There's no innocent way of being in this world", meaning that no one, not even the most enlightened among us, can exist outside of history, outside of the legacies of colonial violence that shaped the world we inhabit.

So how do we as WOC negotiate self-love, fulfillment and passion in a world that's determined to continue rewriting that history on our bodies, our minds, our desires? Where is the space

to begin decolonizing our self-concepts, to recreate Jasmine in our image?

In the next post, I will attempt to answer these questions through critical reflection on my identity/ positionality. I hope some of you will join me in sharing your own conclusions and reflections on sexual self-awareness for WOC.

The Jasmine Diaries Part I: Colonial Legacies and Modern Dilemmas

2011-09-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

As a woman of color, I have a love-hate relationship with Disney. The bald-faced racism, sexism and imperialism make me cringe, and have left psychic wounds that require a lifetime of decolonization to heal from. At the same time, many of the images and songs are almost synonymous with my childhood, icons of the inspiration, creativity and love that shaped my early desires. I yearned with Ariel to explore the world beyond my own, and break free of Sinhalese gender norms for how ‘good girls’ behave. The scenes with Belle walking down the street with her nose in a book spoke to my own bookish little girl heart, and I even imitated the action a few times. I still get a little lump in my throat at the Circle of Life sequence in “The Lion King”, and my heart swells with fierce pride when Mulan chops off her beautiful dark hair and girds herself for battle. At the same time, the constant and unquestioned elevation of hetereosexual marriage, the unspeakably Eurocentric beauty standards, the racist caricatures and white-savior tropes and the circumvention or downright erasure of women's ambitions in favor of 'Love', are deeply troubling. This schism of love and loathing that informs my relationship to pop-culture is a consequence of being a WOC in a heterosexist, white supremacist society, and this schism forces me to acknowledge that, when it comes to its princesses of color, Disney operates with clear double-standards. This was meant to be a one-post look at how Jasmine's body is inscribed with histories of colonial-sexual violence, the vestiges of which WOC navigate daily; but as I started writing and looking at her pictures more, I realized that my relationship to her, and my own body/sexuality, is far more complex than could be encapsulated in a single post.

First, let me start by saying: I LOVE Jasmine. I love her wit, courage and diplomacy, and her rebellion against patriarchal norms. I love that her image - the long hair black as deep night, the almond eyes, and dark-toffee skin - makes me recognize and love those aspects of my own body. If we lived in a world unburdened with the history of European colonization, where skin color was not fused with a hierarchy of power and desirability, the image of a beautiful, sensual brown girl with a bare belly and midnight eyes would be simply that: an image, one among many.

But that's not the world we inhabit. In the world as is, white female-identified bodies are coded as the ultimate embodiment of femininity and all its attendant connotations: innocence, sensitivity, virtue, grace etc. By constructing an image of the sanctified white female body, colonizer mentality justified the rape and enslavement of women of color who were deemed exotically savage, wild, oversexed and un-rapeable. Where colonialism gave birth to Orientalism was in the fetishizing of power and conquest, whereby women of the 'East' were imagined as exotic temptresses beckoning alluringly to white men from behind sheer veils in sumptuous harems.

In the white colonial imaginary, their (our) bodies came to symbolize the bountiful lands of the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian

Gulf that were coveted by Western powers; like those lands, our bodies had to be constructed as needing and welcoming white conquest, as ripe for the colonial picking.

Thus, Jasmine was born.

She is the archetype of white colonial fantasies: the alluring dark-skinned woman, exotically desirable like cinnamon and indigo and other spices that were the corporate backbone of colonialism, a hedonistic indulgence counterpointing the tastes of 'civilized' Europeans. Profitable, but not an equal by any means. Exploitable, and therefore undeserving of respect. In the words of Ursula Rucker: "good enough to fuck but/ not good enough to vote". In white patriarchy, a woman's body is an object to be traded and bargained with; a woman whose body is deemed easily accessible, loses her value and her right to respect, to human dignity. This is how the First World regards the lands and people of the Third World whose resources they have gleefully plundered and monopolized, and this is how WOC are symbolically, culturally and sociopolitically situated in white colonial hegemony. Thus the politics of land theft and resource usurpation, of cultural imperialism, systematic rape and dehumanization, intersect on our bodies and shape our sexual self-awareness.

Fast forward to the present, and Jasmine's image haunts our collective psycho-social conscious, informing how WOC are not only seen but treated, reflecting the colonialities of power that persist between global North and South.

It's no coincidence that out of the Disney princess menagerie, the three WOC (Pocahontas, Esmeralda and Jasmine) are the scantiest clad. It's no coincidence that, while Belle and Ariel and Aurora are undoubtedly sexualized, that they're sexual allure is composed of a wide-eyed innocence, a girlish shyness and naivete, while Jasmine and Esmeralda move in deliberately sinuous lines, their bodies openly sexual and beckoning. Consider the posing of Jasmine's

body here as she bids goodnight to Aladdin and this sequence in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", where the fanatical Frollo envisions Esmeralda's dancing body entwined in flames, conflating Brown female sexuality with satanic temptation: both are disturbing not the least considering that Disney is often touted as a symbol of innocence, of childhood and fantasy and play. Of course, the real reason Disney is able to evade criticism is because it protects the 'innocence' (read early racism/ignorance) of white children/ societies and venerates the bodies of white women: in short, the powers that be, the powers of white, colonial heteropatriarchy allow Disney to thrive because it benefits and solidifies the status quo. In its sexual scapegoating of WOC, and its exotic romanticizing of colonial histories, Disney is but an agent of imperialism, psychologically invading and colonizing our collective psyches under the guise of "childhood innocence". Only those of us who know that innocent childhoods are a privilege, understand that when it comes to WOC Disney movies are interchangeable with colonial tracts, with Orientalist paintings, with Columbus' journals, with John Smith's fantasies.

When I see images of Jasmine, I'm torn between love and anger. Love, because her image is my image, the image of our women, dark, voluptuous, almond-eyed, bold and courageous. Torn, because it's an image that is filtered through colonial gazing, that reinscribes a historical value system on the bodies of young WOC. Even now, at 25 years old, I grapple with the meanings and desires embedded in Jasmine's image and in Esmeralda's dancing. Hopefully these posts will speak to other WOC who have struggled with the same issues, so that we can begin speaking back to images and desires that simultaneously oppress, haunt, empower and seduce.

Transnational Desi Pride

2011-08-27T19:05:00.000-07:00

"There is an unexploded land mine heart in us

under every breast chest

waiting for breath

tears a moan

to crack the land open

and let the stories come walking

out of the scar"

-Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha "landmine heart"

For my island Desis, exiled from the ocean for years, chasing foam wings in our dreams and awakening with the memory of feet sinking into sand.

For the Desis who haven't seen our parents, best friends, brothers, sisters, cousins in too long, counting the days weeks months pennies years

For my Desis who know what missing a country, a land, a soil, a people with every drop of blood in our veins, feels like

For Hindu Desis who must watch the ancient rites of Yoga packaged and sold and gobbled up

For Muslim Desis walking courageously through the warzone where racism and Islamophobia intersect.

For Desis who watched the celebration of Bin Laden's death and asked ourselves: now will the stamp of criminality be removed from our passports, our skin, our people, already knowing the answer

For Desis who drape our saris and salwars over the secrets of our bodies: the abortions, the secret birth control, the unwanted touching by a respected uncle

For Desis who know, that one phone-call to their parents by a malicious ex-lover could mean the funding pulled, college dreams crushed, but who are brave enough to own the rights of our bodies and make love anyway

For Desis who are afraid to tell of the rape, the abuse, the violence, because the 'community' is deemed more important than our bodily integrity

For Desis whose eyelids burn at the racist criticisms of that community, because goddamit it's our community and WE will be the ones to change it

For Desis who love interracially, wondering why everyone is so bent on binary worlds when we have always lived in multiplicity

For queer Desis, daring to be both, a contradiction to so many oppressive definitions

For the Desis who said fuck it and chose motherhood, brown mamas raising brown babies in a world that despises both

For Desis who must listen to US-ians say 'oh, international students are all rich', and picture our parents' drained life-savings, written away in check after unfaltering check to the colleges where international students are always the scapegoats

For my dark-skinned Desis, marginalized in our own communities

For my light-skinned Desis, 'admired' as objects and trophies, silenced as whores and sluts

For every Desi who ever read Shakespeare and wrote poetry, despite a world that tries to tell us we have no place in Literature

For my Desi nerds, proud of our nerdiness, despite the fun-poking from fellow Desis and the racism of fandoms

For my Desis serving sandwiches to their peers, impatient white college students that make faces when we speak our language, and wondering: as you grab your pulled pork sandwich, have you ever thought about food exile, about wanting to taste your mother's food so much it hurts when you breathe?

For my Desis whipping up chapati and curry in cramped college apartments, sharing the taste of home with others

For all Desis, everywhere, defying boundaries, rewriting histories, re-imagining communities, fighting the good fight and making tortilla-chapati hybrids, loving our zari-thread saris and our bicycles too, rubbing coconut oil in our long hair and piercing our belly buttons: we were always more than what they could imagine, our lives are chimera flowers flourishing wherever planted.

For my Desis everywhere, I love you.

Whiteness, Buddhism and Safe Spaces: Hands off our sitio y lengua!

2011-07-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

"...white society desires Third World people to mimic the colonizers. Our land, our dignity, our rights absorbed by their omnipotent power everywhere we turn. To assuage their guilt , they want to co-opt us, make us like them. Assimilation is their best fantasy" - Emma Pérez, from "Sexuality and Discourse"

Since my last post on Buddhism, appropriation and POC identity, quite a few things transpired in the blogosphere. While two white Buddhist bloggers decided to decry my 'anti-white racism' and my supposed irrational distaste for Richard Gere, several courageous and inspiring POC and ally Buddhists have written in solidarity, acknowledging the sociocultural and political (yes, political) realities of race, identity and Buddhism. While the comments and emails from POC whose experiences resonated with my writing have been invaluably heartening, I've had to wade through no small amount of bullfeces from folks in the Buddhist community who are virulently opposed to any form of discussion around privilege and identity. While I knew from the get-go that staking a politicized, Third-World womanist claim to Buddhist identity would incite some responses, I was unprepared for the veritable maelstrom that followed. In the wake of that maelstrom however, I've asked myself some questions about why cultural appropriation is such a hard topic to broach, about why I feel determined to broach it, and why as a POC I harbor such a visceral anger when Whiteness appropriates cultures of color. This post was the result.

Brilliant Chicana feminist, Emma Perez, uses the phrase "sitio y lengua" to discuss culture, appropriation and empowerment for women of color. Translated as 'space and language', sitio y lengua names the dilemma faced by POC in general and WOC in particular in white-supremacist, heterosexist, patriarchal culture. How do we survive the emotional and physical aftermath of colonization, and the present historical reality of institutionalized subjugation, and leave ourselves whole, happy, intact and fulfilled? This is where culture and cultural practice comes in, especially for diasporic and immigrant communities who make their home away from the 'home' nation. Cultural practice allows a safe space, a space where we need not justify ourselves, our bodies, our existence to Whiteness. A space where we can draw strength from tangibles and intangibles - food, prayer, music, clothes, language - and be reminded of the courage and resistance of our people. In the absence of physical sitio y lengua, POC draw on the intangibles to sustain ourselves: religious practice or spirituality, cultural values of community: we create mental sitio y lengua.

When cultural appropriation happens, and Whiteness declares itself entitled to our sitio y lengua, it's just another form of the continuing colonial process. Colonizer hegemony is never satisfied so long as POC have even a modicum of safe, sacred space. What Perez exquisitely terms "colonizer castration anxiety", means that Whiteness fears that its historical crimes will one day be perpetrated on itself. It fears that POC will wreak genocide and resource theft/ usurpation on white folks; because of its historical role in racism and colonialism, Whiteness is incapable of envisioning a different reality, one in which cultural plurality exists without a power hierarchy.

I realize that the reason I am so angered by cultural appropriation, is because it violates a last safe space that I, as a WOC, can claim. It takes away my sitio y lengua by insisting that Whiteness be a presence there. It diminishes our resistance to white supremacy by saying see, white people can practice POC cultural traditions just as well as, even better than, POC. Our cultural spaces are sacred sites of resistance and love, empowerment and healing: they are not a free-for-all for Whiteness to feel better about its historical guilt or pick up some sort of good-White-person street cred. As long as I have strength and breath left, I will continue to defend our sitio y lengua, and demand respect for the strength and beauty of our peoples' continued resistance.

"Brown is the soil

of an unlived land

whose dirt I scatter

wherever I go

How we darkeye each other across the room

is something you'll never know

You'll never know us

You don't know how to plant this soil

give it up this food is too hot for you

and you won't cut down this

or any

of these olive trees

still bearing fruit"

--Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

from "I am a contradiction to your definition"

**Note: my computer is old and clunky, and lacked the keystrokes for accents over

Perez's name. My apologies to any native Spanish speakers.

***Note: check out this excellent post on Whiteness if you're new to the terminology.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, Part III: A Brown Buddhist and a Handful of Mustard Seeds

2011-06-21T13:08:00.001-07:00

Recently, after years of leaving it blank, I filled in the ‘Religious Views’ on my Facebook page to read “Pro-Woman Buddhism”. Deciding to reclaim the Buddhist identity I grew up with is the culmination of many things; deciding to reclaim it while located in the global North, and more specifically the United States, is a deeply personal act with political implications.

In my post on Bin-Laden's death, I briefly touched on the experience of identifying as Buddhist in both majority Islamic and majority Christian locales. In both spaces, the Buddhism I grew up with was read as invalid somehow, a pseudo-religion because we recognized no omnipotent deity as such. As a 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 year old, I was regularly questioned by Muslim classmates and teachers to explain who 'Lord Buddha' was, and why we worship him. I would stammer, look down and burn with shame because I could not find the words to explain myself. Religious persecution and imperialism were early lessons for me.

Fast forward to my college years in the US, and I was met with the same dismissal/ proselytism/ ignorance that I had grown up surrounded by, except now it was from Christians who would make baldly disrespectful statements like 'the Buddha isn't...anything. Jesus is the son of God' et cetera.

During my freshman year, I tried to read a book about Buddhism, hoping it would soothe my homesickness and comfort me. The book was written by a white man whose name I can't recall; but what I do recall is feeling confused by and disconnected from his description of Buddhism. There was much focus on individual serenity, 'lovingkindness' and meditation. Looking back, I realize why this white man's interpretation of my people's religion failed to resonate with me in any way: cultural appropriation, and the erasure of cultural context.

Buddhism, for me, is inseparable from my culture and experience as a woman from Sri Lanka, from the Third World, from a family that always honored religious diversity. In my maternal grandmother's house, I grew up seeing altars dedicated to Jesus and Mary, as well as Buddha. I went to church with my one aunt, and to the temple with my parents. To mark the anniversary of someone's passing, we would cook all day and give the food to an orphanage, or to young women (mostly with children) who are forced by poverty to live and beg on the streets. I learned about how Prince Siddhartha, before he became Gautama Buddha, rescued a swan that had been injured by a hunter's slingshot, and nursed it back to health, and how he ever after decried the mistreatment of animals; after all, in a belief system of reincarnation, the body maybe four, eight or two-legged, but the soul is one. This is also why I shrink inside when (mostly) US Christians talk about being granted 'dominion' over animals and the earth.

The Buddhism I grew up with taught me respect for other faiths, other ways of seeing and being in the world. I truly believe that I would not be able to appreciate Christ's radical compassion for the oppressed, the blessed hospitality of Eid meals shared with Muslim friends, or the feminist empowerment of La Virgen de Guadalupe to the degree that I do, if not for those early lessons taught by the Buddhists around me. Buddhism has always informed by belief in social justice, in anti-oppression, in peace

Much like the commercialization and appropriation of Yoga serves as a profound source of anger and frustration to many South-Asian Hindus, I'm alternately befuddled and angered by white appropriation of Buddhism. No, I don't care how many times Richard Gere used his private jet to visit the Dalai Lama, stripping a belief system of its cultural context and putting it on like a pair of shoes, without acknowledging the struggles and realities of the people whom that culture belongs to, is imperialist, disrespectful, and mostly racist. The shallow ease with which Whiteness claims to understand the experiences of cultures of colour continues to bewilder me. How can you claim something as part of your identity, on par with people who grew up living and breathing that culture everyday? How can you claim to own something you've never had to defend, or fight for? And please, spare me the details of how your white Lutheran parents disapproved of your visits to the meditation center.

When I wrote that reclaiming a Buddhist identity in North America is political, I was referring to its inseparability from my other identities, and to the context of racist appropriation surrounding cultures of color in the global North. I don't go to a meditation center, I don't know what 'lovingkindness' is supposed to mean, I don't conceive of myself as a serene speck of unruffled dust floating along the karmic Universe; in short, I have no part in the individualistic, elite, consumer-oriented, pseudo-hippie global tourist bullfeces that Whiteness tries to pass of as practicing Buddhism.

I have plenty to be angry about in this world, and my anger at injustice does not make me a lesser Buddhist. Because I don't visit meditation centers doesn't mean I don't live and practice the principles of Buddhism in everyday acts like sharing food and water, or nurturing community. I believe that 'inner serenity' as enjoyed by the privileged, is an illusion that insults Buddhism's legacy of advocating for the poor and marginalized. There are many ways to practice Buddhism, but humility is the foremost of all practices: a trait that global North citizens never seem to have much use for.

********

A month ago, I lost one of my dearest friends to suicide. I am still reeling with shock and grief; most days my mind refuses to accept that he is gone, his life ended by his own hand. Then I remind myself of a Buddhist parable I always loved: the Parable of the Mustard Seeds. A young, recently widowed woman loses her infant to disease; unable to accept the death of both her husband and her baby, she becomes possessed with grief, and roams the village with the body of her dead child, asking holy man after holy man to revive the child, to undo death. Then she hears that Gautama Buddha is preaching close by, and she goes to him with the same request. He tries to dissuade her, to convince her that he has no such powers, that Death is inevitable, but to no avail. She insists that he bring her baby back to life. Finally he says, "I can revive your child, but in order for me to do so, you must bring me a handful of mustard seeds from a household in which there has been no death". Overjoyed at first, she agrees, and goes from house to house in her village, asking for a handful of mustard seeds if there has been no death. But there is no household in the village that has not known death in some form, and so after she has visited each house, she becomes exhausted, and her grief loosens, and she realizes that no one may alive may escape Death, and that everyone she knows has lost someone they loved. Weary at last, she buries her child, and returns to the feet of the Buddha, who comforts her with Dhamma.

This is what Buddhism as I know it does: reminds us to be humble, to accept grief without shame, to recognize community, to reach out to others, to remain aware of our interconnectedness. But mostly, it gives me something to hold on to, something that is mine, from the country of my birth that I love beyond words.

In the face of loss., we are all looking for the handful of mustard seeds

The Death of Bin Laden, and What it Means (or Doesn't Mean) To me

2011-05-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

I think it was on Blackberry messenger that someone first told me Bin Laden was dead. That message was soon followed by FB status changes, and news headlines all over the Internet. I remember my first, honest reaction being "..And? So what?" What does this change? Is the US going to dismantle the Patriot Act, and restore the civil liberties it stripped away? Are we going to see an active effort on the part of mass media to quell the stereotypes about Middle-eastern peoples? Are all troops going to be immediately withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan, to be followed by economic reparations to these countries? Are the hundreds of thousands of dead women, men and children, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in New York, in the UK, in Pakistan, in India, in Palestine, going to be miraculously reincarnated? What exactly is gained by the death of one man?

Of course, since that first reaction, I've had time to think, to read what others are saying and listen to those who have valid thoughts on the issue. I realized that it's not my place to tell others they shouldn't rejoice in his death, nor lecture them on pacifism and forgiveness; I did not lose family or friends in 9/11, my family and loved ones aren't serving in a US or Allied military, I am not a Muslim who may feel relief that one of the most infamous embodiments of perverted radical Islam is no more, and I'm certainly not a full-blooded US citizen for whom Bin Laden represented a threat to the land I call my own. I am between all of these, invisibilized, a transnational woman of color who's never been able to vote because I was too young when we left the one country where I am a citizen. What right do I have to feel anything about Bin Laden at all?

I often turn to these song lyrics by Ani Difranco:

"I've got friends all over this country

Friends in other countries too

I've got friends I haven't met yet

I've got friends I'll never know"

For me, those words aren't about superficial, hand-holding, we-are-all-one nonsense. It's about acknowledging interconnectedness, it's about recognizing that jingoistic nationalism is not an option when one has family and friends in multiple locations of the world, transplanted by the inexorable forces of history and political economics. It's about saying that the color and origin of your passport should not factor into whether you deserve full human rights. And it's about understanding that we didn't get to this point in our collective human history because the 'bad guys' kept harassing the 'good guys', and that what happens to one of us, happens to us all. US ALL.

I was 14 years old when 9/11 happened, a bookish Sri Lankan girl attending a strict, Islamic school in the United Arab Emirates. I remember always feeling othered by the majority Muslim student body, shamed by my teachers because I couldn't read Arabic well, regularly encountering ignorant, insulting questions about my Buddhist faith. I remember the racism practiced against the South Asian expatriate community by the Arab Emirati citizenry, I remember being told that as a South Asian expatriate, I would never vote, own property or have any adequate legal recourse in the face of discrimination and exploitation. When 9/11 happened, my mother cautioned us, Don't talk about your opinion in public, don't get involved in any discussions, just don't say anything, be careful. Then the announcement about the invasion of Afghanistan. My aunt and my mother decided to keep their valuable jewelry and the family passports in Ziploc bags, all together, so they could be grabbed and taken with in case of... what? I was too afraid to ask, and they to tell me.

I wonder if they know, the people dancing in the streets and rejoicing in Bin Laden's death, that their passports guarantee they will never have to lie low, cower under uncertainty to protect themselves. I wonder if most of my progressive friends who are US citizens know.

Ten years since 9/11, I'm 24 years old, about to graduate from a US institution with a B.A in Women's Studies and English. I have yet to vote, anywhere. I am not a US citizen, and when I marry my partner, we will undergo extensive and embarrassing questioning about the 'validity' of our relationship. To most white USians, I will never look like a US citizen. To Emiratis, I look like the women they think fit only to clean their toilets and cook for them. To Sri Lankans on the island, I'm one of the "absent elite"*, someone who's had the privilege of foreign life and education.

But I stood up against the killing of innocent US citizens all those years ago, when my 6th grade classmates were high-fiving each other about 9/11. I stand up for Islam, for Muslims and the people of the Middle-east when US-ians loudly sprout their racist, Islamophobic ignorance. I refute the idea that Sri Lankans and other Third World nations are inherently prone to violence, by constantly pointing out the history of colonialism that orchestrates that violence. I belong nowhere, and yet somehow I belong in several places. I have been racially profiled in post 9/11 airports. My Sri Lankan passport prevents me from transiting and traveling through several key global locations. I've been called a 'Paki' here in the US. I have a right to state my opinion on Bin Laden, because even though as a non-citizen and transnational WOC I'm invisible and incomprehensible to many, the things he did, the things that those before him did, the things that those who created him and then hunted him down did, affect me every single day.

As I write this, I'm wearing my sweatshirt that says "Anti-Racism", and my green Kaffiyeh that I purchased in Dubai, in December 2008 when Israel was shelling Palestinian homes mercilessly. I remember reading the newspapers everyday, looking and weeping at the pictures of burnt Palestinian bodies, at the father kneeling in tears beside his two dead toddlers. In the summer of 2009, when the Sri Lankan military was pushing ruthlessly upwards into the Northern provinces, the Internet briefly swam with images of mutilated and destitute Tamil civilians, ousted by the military or rounded into miserable concentration camps. I remember feeling untold pain, but also wanting to scream at everyone who was posting those pictures Don't you people have any respect? Those suffering brown people are my people, they are not objects for your First World camera to win you photography prizes.

Colonialism, genocide, racism - all of which are predicated on the mass murder of innocent people - existed long before Bin Laden took to his caves and his militia, and will continue to exist as long as we allow those in power to lie to us, to offer us false symbols of national pride as our economic security crumbles around us, to placate us with a false rhetoric of exceptionalism while they roll back our civil and political rights.

Last week a transwoman in Baltimore was brutally assaulted. Many trans and queer friends of mine are afraid to hold hands in public, afraid of walking alone to their apartment, afraid of heterosexist, cissupremacist violence. Arizona and the US writ large continues to criminalize the same people it depends on to pick its fruit and raise its children and build its computers. The high school students in Tuscon might face criminal charges for protesting the war on Chican@ Studies. Planned Parenthood has been stripped of its Medicaid funding in Indiana, with similar bills popping up elsewhere. The economic war on the poor, on women of color, on the differently abled, has gained frightening momentum since those buildings first crashed to the ground.

Suheir Hammad wrote: "I'm looking for my body/ My form in the foreign/ In translation". I'm looking for my place in all of this, as I've been looking long before 9/11, as I will continue to look after Bin Laden's death. All I know is, the economic, political, social and cultural violence being perpetrated on marginalized bodies needs to end.

******

Bin Laden is dead.

I look at what's happening in Arizona, in Chattisgarh, in Jaffna, even here in Minnesota. I look at the images of people celebrating Bin Laden's death with stars and stripes, and I try to understand what it must feel like to look at a flag, any flag, and be assured it represents you.

Bin Laden is dead.

I look around at everything I know: and I feel a complicated sorrow, I feel anger, I feel fear, I feel like I've been poisoned by hate and anger, and wearied by the struggle to resist that poison.

I feel everything, but joy.

"I will leave Draupadi in her garden, watering her mysterious plant. I can't give you it's name, because I haven't figured it out myself, what you reach for when the consolation of righteous rage no longer consoles you. But I hope it grows into a tree so huge its roots crack the foundations of the old palace. I hope the wind blows its seeds across the land, giving birth to more trees, and more, so that long after Draupadi's bones are covered by glaciers travellers everywhere will rest under their shade, and bless that which comes after venegance "
-Chitra Banerjee Divakruni, from "The Vine of Desire"

*phrase used by Chandra Talpade Mohanty in "Genealogies of Home"

How do you Unlearn Supremacy? Field Notes on Sri Lanka, Sinhala supremacy and Third-world radical solidarity

2011-04-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

I've started and abandoned this post many times in the last year. Sometimes, I wouldn't even get as far as typing words, I would just bury the thoughts in my head. Other times, I would stare at the screen while my brain refused to activate my fingers. Recognizing that hate has been planted deep inside you, that somewhere along the way you learned to see a people as less than human, is far from simple. This is why many white people live their whole lives vociferously denying racism, because to admit its existence would necessitate a long, hard look into the hate they are taught to live, breathe and perpetuate everyday. I've written a great deal about whiteness, race and privilege, and yet I keep shrinking from an honest examination of my own ethnic privilege relative to my home nation, Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka has been racked by the longest Civil War in South-east Asia, and yet as a country we are barely a blip on the radar of the Western world. The only time we are allowed to appear on the hallowed screens of the BBC and the CNN is when increased violence allows ample fodder for First World viewers to objectify more brown bodies and cultures, to feel sorry for us. I say 'us' even though I and my family have never been placed in a concentration camp, lost someone to a suicide bombing or been forced off our home by the military. Do I have a right to say 'us'?

During the increased military progress into Jaffna two years ago, I got into a few heated arguments with family members. I was of the opinion that the military should lift its ban on journalists so that we could have a true account of what was happening in Jaffna. Many of my family members retorted that if we get caught up on "human rights issues" and "protecting civilians", "we" would never win this war, and that civilian deaths couldn't be helped because ultimately, ensuring an "end to war" was more "important". How do we unlearn hate that's been bred so close to home?

I understand why Sinhala people might bristle when "human rights" are mentioned: the phrase has been codified as a Western imposition, whereby nations like the US and the UK get to wag their fingers at the uncivilized brown people, but gleefully set up camp in Guantanamo and sell arms to Darfur and aim cannon fire at Palestinian youth armed only with rocks from their decimated homes. But I shrink from this collective urge to model ourselves, our nation, after the brutality of the colonialists who stole from us for centuries, so that we might be successful and "developed" according to their standards. If we reject their paternalism and hypocrisy regarding human rights, why then can't we also reject their blueprints for genocidal nation-building?

But I'm going macro again when I wanted to keep this micro. I know, we cannot dissect internalized racism and bigotry without paying attention to institutions, but I want to hold myself accountable to decolonizing my mind without abstracting my personal responsibility in the process. Because unlearning my Sinhala supremacy and finding ways to be in solidarity with Tamil women, MUST begin at home, with me and those I love. At the end of the day, I can wax eloquent all I want about anti-colonial solidarity between Third World sisters, but if I'm not actively seeking to repudiate colonialist patterns of hate that I, personally, have subscribed to, I'm only lip-servicing solidarity without actually being willing to do the work. And isn't that what I get down on white feminists for ALL the time?

A heroine of mine, transnational, black, Canadian-based feminist Jacqui Alexander, has this to say: "We are not born women of color. We become women of color. To become women of color, we need to become fluent in each other's histories... "
What little I know of Tamil women, and the history of Tamil struggle, is distorted through Sinhala supremacy. Even as I write this, I feel that supremacist resistance welling up, insisting that the version of Sri Lankan history I grew up with is THE only one, and that the Tamil counter-narrative is nothing but lies and exaggeration. This resistance feels almost visceral, like the supremacy has been grafted onto my bones, configured to my DNA.

This is how we perpetuate hate, by allowing it to be both invisible and ubiquitous, like the blood in our veins and the air in our lungs. We live with it inside us for so long, that we don't even realize it's part of us.

I'm not sure how to end this post, because it's something I know I will, I must return to. But as my words wind down I find myself returning to the phrase "fluent in each other's histories". I must become fluent in the history of those whom I wish to be in solidarity with, and I need to commit myself to this education. Unlearning supremacy seems so threatening to the entire worldview of the supremacists, that we often cower under history and refuse to act. Sometimes, we just need to take a first step.

Arab Women Aren't the Only Women in the Middle-East

2011-04-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

Last year, I had the privilege to attend the National Women's Studies Association annual conference in Denver, Colorado. Despite the numerous fails by white feminists (white maternalism towards women of colour was running amok), I will never forget the exhilaration of meeting and conversing with trailblazing women of colour like Angela Davis, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Emma Perez, or watching with tears in my eyes as the Annanya Dance Theatre articulated their bodily politic of transnational solidarity.

One of the panels I attended was a round-table of women from the United Arab Emirates ( and a couple of other Arab nations), talking about their attempts to establish women/gender studies programs at various colleges in the UAE. When I was 9 years old, my parents moved us to Dubai, the most populous and economically notable city of the UAE. My family still resides there, as expatriates, along with thousands of other communities from South East Asia and parts of Africa. Although I will never be a citizen of the UAE, I consider it a home in many ways, having spent some of the most formative years of my life there.

I was excited at the prospect of sitting down with these women and discussing the trials and tribulations of activists in the UAE. After all, in my senior year of high school, my best friend and I went up against the school administration to start a feminist newsletter at school. We researched the laws on spousal abuse. We sparked heated discussions with other teachers and students over religious orthodoxy, racism and sexism. My friend was a Sudanese Muslim woman, and I a Sri Lankan Buddhist: we recognized that our experiences of the UAE were both similar and profoundly different, that each of us felt accepted and isolated in different ways by the socio-national conscious.

Back to the roundtable at the NWSA. When I introduced myself and explained my reasons for being there, the women on the panel nodded politely, but there was a glassiness to their eyes, almost as though I was speaking a different language. As the discussion progressed, it became clear that their discussion of women and gender in the UAE, and the Middle-east in general, was monolithically focused on one type of woman: Arab/ Muslim women (usually middle to upper class) who were citizens. I and another woman tried a few times to question them about the realities of expatriate living, about ghettoized communities, about ethnic imperialism and state sanctioned classism, but these queries were met with a sort of vague surprise (again, as if we were speaking separate languages), and the discussion was immediately riveted back on Arab/Muslim women.

There was much talk about how, contrary to Western constructions of Muslim/ Arab women, many women are extremely educated and politically involved. However, while education is free for citizens of the UAE, expatriates like my parents had to pay for the K through 12 education of their children. Additionally, as non-citizens, people like my family have no legal recourse against the state, meaning the threat of deportation is held over us constantly, curbing our ability to demand fair pay, better hours, job security and even basic respect from the police and judicial authorities. So while the state maybe educating its citizens, the exploitation of vast swathes of the population is justified on the basis of their 'temporary' presence in the country, even though many of us have lived and worked and helped build the economy of the UAE for DECADES.

Next, they discussed how they use Islam as a gateway to introduce young women to feminism, by focusing on the imperatives towards equality in the Qur'an. The panelists (all of whom were Muslim) were enthused about this, and pointed out how many Muslim youth are eager to refute Western discourses of primitivism by celebrating the egalitarianism of Islam. While this is indeed noteworthy, the discussion once again left out non-Muslim women like myself who are also part of the UAE. I use "non-Muslim" specifically because that is what I was referred to for most of my school life: I was the only 'non-Muslim' in my class, the only who whose Arabic reading was poor because unlike my Muslim peers I had no practice reading Suarahs regularly. I had to endure years of awkward and ignorant questions by both students and teachers about my religion (Sinhalese Buddhism is often incomprehensible to orthodox Christians, Muslims and other monotheisms because the Gautama Buddha firmly insisted that he was a human being only), and resist many attempts at conversion by Muslim students convinced I was hell-bound.

All of these are experiences of many women in the UAE and throughout the Middle-east, expatriate world, and yet they were completely ignored by the panel I was at.

I understand that Arab/ Muslim women have a long, rich history of struggle and resistance, both against patriarchal religious orthodoxy and Western imperialism. In fact, since being in the United States, I consider myself proudly allied to women like Suheir Hammad, Nawal El-Saadawi and others who speak out against imperialism, genocide and racism. But I can't forget or ignore the racism and imperialism endorsed by many Arab/Muslim women against South Asian women in the Middle-east. Thousands of Sri Lankan, Filipina and Indonesian women work as domestic labour in Arab/ Muslim households, and the realities of sexual assault, abuse and violence are rampant. Many of these women are held virtual hostage by families who seize their passport. Last year, a young Filipina jumped out of a window after stabbing her rapist employer; she survived the fall, but was tried and jailed after her recovery. South Asian women are constructed by Emirati/Muslim society as sexually wanton, as lazy, as stupid; in fact, they are constructed much in the same way that Black and Latina women have been constructed in subjugation to whiteness in the US. I have seen, and experienced this racism firsthand when I lived in Dubai. In many ways, Emirati/ Muslim society aspires towards whiteness by colluding in the negative racialization of workers from South East Asia; westerners and Emiratis are openly paid three times as much as Asians in Dubai. My aunt worked at HSBC for decades, and when she quit, they hired an Emirati woman at twice my aunt's salary, and with more benefits.

There's more: there's the colorism that values porcelain-skinned Emirati, Palestinian, Lebanese women and ranks Asian women in a hierarchy of lightness (Filipinas are stereotyped as sluts, but considered preferable to Indians and Sri Lankans because they tend to be lighter skinned). Kola Boof does an excellent job deconstructing the collusion of Arabness with Whiteness in her posts. Colonialities of power become intertwined with new forms of economic and cultural imperialism, the effects of which are written on the bodies of thousands of women who, because of our non-Arab, non-Muslim, non-citizen status, are invisbilized in discussions about "women in the Middle-east".

So I'm going to end with a kind of open urging to Arab/Muslim/ Emirati feminists. Many of us South Asian women have your back here in the Western hemisphere, we openly decry Islamophobia and orientalism, we recognize our struggles as similar and linked, but we need you to do the same and acknowledge our labor, our presence, our experiences in 'your' countries. We demand a place at the table of "women in the Middle-east".

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, Part II: Notes on Guinevere

2011-04-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

On my last Unbearable Whiteness post, a commenter directed me to the BBC show 'Merlin', wherein a woman of colour plays Guinevere. Intrigued, I immediately proceeded to cue it on Netflix, and two months later I'm now a devoted fan.

While the show still invites scrutiny for its constructions of power, patriarchy and sexuality, I want to focus on the politics and implications of Guinevere's casting. Angel Coulby, a biracial, Black actress, plays humble and beautiful maidservant Gwen, destined to be Queen of Camelot.

The casting directors, who sought an actress that could evince the regality of a future queen while still a handmaiden, described Coulby as possessing the innate grace, shyness and nobility they were looking for, and the fact they weren't convinced of Guinevere's "inherent whiteness", as one fan blogger put it, is pretty damn remarkable to me. Just a heads up white folks: if you wanna push colourblindness, this is the kind of colourblindness you need to advocate, where POC are as unlimited by their race as white folks.

Of course, not everyone is pleased that the beautiful Coulby is filling the shoes of Guinevere. This blogger, in fact, has major issues with the casting and claims a supposed trend of non-Europeans being cast in "massively European roles". Excuse me if I'm bothered by the smell of BULLSHIT. "The Last Airbender" anyone? "Hunger Games"? "A Mighty Heart"? "Cleopatra"?
But of course, the moment POC start being allowed even a smidgen of the access and visibility that whiteness has monopolized for centuries, the shit starts flipping.

Even more telling perhaps, is this writer's claim that Guinevere looks "seriously non-British". I suppose the fact that Coulby was born and raised in the UK is a minor detail: the white man gets to decide who's British and who isn't.

Some other members of the fandom, as well as random commentors on YouTube and IMDB, complain that Coulby is too plain, that her casting is 'historically inaccurate', and that her presence disrupts their suspension of disbelief. Guess a woman of colour as the central love interest is more fantastical than, say, a magic dragon that talks. Right.

It's interesting to me that when POC protested over whitewashing in "The Last Airbender", the resounding white defense was 'But it's JUST a fantasy! Race doesn't matter in a fantasy universe!'. Anyone smell a double standard mingling with the odour of bullshit?

Whiteness is constructed as human, as normal, and is thus allowed to be ahistorical, acultural and apolitical: white bodies can travel across time, space and cultures and have their presence normalized. But a beautiful black woman capturing the heart of a legendary British figure? Cognitively dissonant in a white supremacist society.

Because really, winnow out the historian posturing and righteous outrage, and what you have is a group of white people feeling threatened about their supremacist worldview. Images of Guinevere have been varied and disparate throughout the ages, from willowy neo-classical renderings to Keira Knightely in boots and weaponry; the Arthurian myth itself has been interpreted and reinterpreted countless times (for instance, Lancelot was not even a character until some French poet thought it would be saucy to throw in a love triangle, and thus popularize the literary sexism of blaming women for the 'fall' of man). Many scholars and historians also conclude that Arthur was by no means the paragon of democracy and justice he is so often made out to seem in modern interpretations, and that we reimagine him with values similar to what we hold dear contemporarily. Why then, the fuss and protest over a black Guinevere?

The same blogger that says Coulby looks 'non-british', also says that historically 'inaccurate' castings like blond, Nordic looking Jesus figures, are relatively ok because: "in this case, Jesus was being portrayed as envisioned by much of the target audience, not – as is the case with Guinevere ... in direct contradiction to audience expectation." So the assumption being that the audience is white or desires pervasive whiteness, and that they should be catered to. This proves that whiteness is completely determined to not only maintain its hegemony, but to unapologetically demand it.

I think this can boil down to what we believe the function of myth, storytelling and media is. As a womanist, as a radical WOC, it is my belief that mass media is ethically required to weigh systems of power and oppression, and be historically conscious. Britain is no longer a white monoracial nation; like it or not, people of diverse ethnicities and racial idenities now call England and the UK their home. The hue and cry over Coulby's casting is not about purported historical accuracy, but about maintaining the mythological cornerstones of Englishness as WHITE. It's about white folks being able to see themselves reflected as the true citizens of England, as the ones who deserve to be honored in legendarium, as the ones who represent the best of the nation.

Myth is a powerful storytelling tool, because it allows us to extrapoate our worldviews, our realties and explore them through metaphor and fantasy. It allows us to reimagine our communities and crystallize our values, and to visualize nations, peoples and worlds.
Because our collective imaginations are constrained by the sins of our history, women of colour exist as shadowy, othered figures who augment the purity of white women, and whose bodies provide sites for white men like Milton and Spenser to metaphorically convey evil, sin, depravity, and ugliness. Often the best we can hope for is the happy maid who helps white women work out their problems.

And while Guinevere is infact a handmaiden in BBC's version, the fact that she plays a central role in the future of Camelot, not to mention replaces the white woman as the figure of beauty and desirablity, and that her character is scripted as beautiful, graceful, and elegant, subverts the usual Mammy/Jezebel/happy domestic stereotype. Angel Coulby as Guinevere is incredibly powerful symbolically, because it disrupts some key elements of white supremacy: that only white femininity is desirable, that only white figures should be mythological icons, and that people of colour can only exist in this world while subjugated to whiteness.

The creators of "Merlin" have visualized the mythos of Britain (whether voluntarily or not) in a manner that allows all of its modern citizens - not just the white ones - to envison themselves as some part of the national conscious. I for one, regard this as an instance worth celebrating.

**Note: I haven't been able to locate any info as to whether Angel Coulby identifies as black, biracial, brown, woman of colour, or if she claims any specific racial/ethnic identity, or all. So I have used a few terms interchangeably in this post. If anyone knows more as to her specific, preffered identity, please don't hesitate to let me know.

***Note: I realize that the implications of her casting, and her character, as well as the macro narrative of the show 'Merlin', are much more complex than I may have presented here. I just wanted to take a moment to celebrate and focus on the rare instance of a woman of colour being cast in a positive, central role.

****These are some other fandom writers discussing the complexities of race, class and gender on the show: What It Means to me To have a Black Guinevere, and Just Gwen

Straight People Need Therapy

2011-03-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

You heard me: straight people NEED THERAPY.

Let me explain.

Recently, someone very close to me who is gay, confided in me about some aspects of their experience living amid homophobia and heterosexism. As someone who benefits from heterosexual/ cisgender privilege, I was overcome with the usual emotions that I suppose overcome allies: frustration, pain, sadness, helplessness. As much as I love and care for this person, as much as they are a part of me, I can't love or hug institutional heteronormativity away. My person lives in a country where there are NO publicly funded counseling options, much less the chance that therapists can be openly affirming of gay identity. As I was contemplating how I could help them access safe and affirming counseling, I was struck by the invisibilizing of privilege embedded in how so many of us think about social progress.

Here I am, benefiting from a system that inherently values my sexual and gender identity above others, that in fact actively encourages me to FEEL ENTITLED to this value, and yet gay people are the ones that are encouraged to seek 'help'. This attitude, even among lefties, ignores the fact that there is nothing NORMAL or HEALTHY about continual complicity in oppression. There is nothing normal or healthy about living in a state of implicit superiority over others. There is nothing normal about living side by side with family and friends whose life chances are actively impeded, without acknowledging our implication in that.

So what if, side by side with all the counseling available to LGBTQ folks, we actively pushed straight, cisgender folks into therapy programs aimed at unlearning homophobia, transphobia and heterosexism? What if we straight, cis folks committed to attending regular workshops/ therapy sessions that would teach us not to perpetuate oppression? I'm not trying to infer that LGBTQ folks are required to teach straight folks, rather I'm trying to draw attention to the normalization of this idea that LGBTQ folks need psychiatric intervention in their lives in order to remain healthy and happy. The experience/ mental health of the oppressed is pathologized, while the blissful ignorance and ill-gotten complacence of the oppressors is left unexamined.

This applies to whiteness and race too. People of colour often talk about our need for safe spaces, for counselors who understand anti-racism, but I have yet to see widespread demand from white allies for counselors who are anti white-supremacy; oftentimes, caucusing is offered as a way for white folks and POC folks to create the necessary safe spaces, but while we all agree that whiteness is privileged in general public space, there is little effort on the part of white allies to combat this. When it comes down to it, whiteness continues to dominate public space while POC are scrambling to create safe spaces for themselves.

What I'm trying to say, is that it's almost universally easier to glimpse oppression than it is to understand the ubiquity of privilege. It's far easier to designate an LGBTQ safe space or hire a couple of queer-affirming counselors, than it is to widely encourage non-queer folks to clean their shit up and educate themselves. It's far easier for us allies to pat ourselves on the back for helping our queer friends get to a counselor, than it is for us to ask: how much am I doing to unlearn homophobia, and how is my daily life, the way I express myself, complicit (willingly or involuntarily) in heterosexism?

This might seem like an overly simplistic take on a complex issue, and I'm in no way devaluing the need for queer affirming counselors and access to good psychiatric care. Rather, I want to push myself as an ally to constantly remind myself that the complacency born of privilege I feel about my sexual identity, especially when so many others are not granted this privilege, is not a normal or healthy state of being. While even one of us is scapegoated for how they choose to be in their body, there can be no letting ourselves off the hook.

No 'Feminist' Wedding for Me, Thank You.

2011-02-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

Reading Renee's recent post on the white-professional feminism of Jessica Valenti, prompted me to do my own self-reflection. One of the trends in the largely white blogosphere, and one which Valenti took part in popularizing, was the 'feminist weddings' meme. Basically, a lot of (usually white, middle to upper middle-class) women would write blog posts detailing their recent engagement and wedding plans, and how they plan to fashion a 'feminist' wedding. I'm not about to criticize or shame these women for the choices they made, or for how they choose to understand their sexuality and relationships. However, I DO think, as Renee pointed out in this post, that this whole notion of feminist weddings bears examination, especially since those of Valenti's ilk rarely account for the nuances of race, nationality and culture that shape women's identities. So this post is meant to say: Listen up White, ciswomen! You are NOT the definitive authority on legal heterosexual unions.

I recent became engaged to my male partner. He is a wonderful, caring, kind human being who shares my beliefs and values about social justice, community and family. But even before I was engaged to him, certain feminists (most of them white, some in my personal life and some in the blogosphere) would spout judgmental ideas about the monogamous, heterosexual relationship I was entering into. Nevermind that my partner, an ardent bicyclist who challenges mainstream ideas of heterosexual masculinity and always interrupts bigotry when he can, treated me with respect and admiration. White sepratist radical feminism stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that for women of color, heterosexual or not, separatism has hardly ever been viable. Our sons, fathers, brothers, friends and sometimes lovers suffer daily under the same white supremacy that marginalizes us; walking away from them just isn't an option for me.

Furthermore, my Sinhalese cultural upbringing taught me to value marriage differently than white US culture. Sinhalese people recognize that marriage is about family, and that committing to someone includes committing to their family, while also welcoming them into your own. It also showed me that marriage is about values, the daily commitment to building and nurturing a home. So when white feminists loudly decry the choices some women make to commit to a certain kind of relationship (and I'm not talking here about calling out het-cis privilege, which is different than judging women for not living a specific kind of feminist script), they are once again unashamedly displaying their ignorance of the multiple identities and contexts within which women of color are situated.

On the other side of white separatist feminism, lies the white consumerist feminist ala Valenti. You know, the kind that announce MAC has created a specfic shade of red lipstick for Cyndi Lauper & Lady Gaga and therefore these privileged white women are activists. The kind that says, hey, people dying of AIDS in certain African countries has benefits, because they are finally being forced to adopt to Western ideas of sexual 'openness'. The kind that says, here, read another blog post about how I'm getting local catering for the wedding reception and therefore it's a feminist wedding. See I used to believe in the idea of a 'feminist' wedding. Until I read "That's Revolting", edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and had to really look my het-cis privilege in the damn eye. As long as marriage remains a way to deny certain groups access to basic human rights like healthcare, housing, citizenship, family reunification, daycare, work and so on, it can never be a feminist institution no matter how feminist its participants become.

When I marry my partner, because I am not a US citizen, we will have to undergo interrogation by the INS so they can ascertain the 'validity' of our marriage. They can question us about our sex life, infer racist assumptions, and are legally proteced for doing so. If they 'suspect' us, they can separate us, lie to us, intimidate us and try and make us 'confess', upon which we will be charged with a criminal offense and I will be immediately deported. Right now, because of our differing citizenships, our mobility and employment choices as a couple are extremely limited. Legal marriage will certainly amend some; but I have friends, and family who are equally deserving of the things that marriage will afford us, and so to pretend that our ability to get married is anything less than a privilege, or that an institution that sanctions the blatant violation of people's privacy in order to exalt US citizenship can be remade as 'feminist' because one wears a blue dress instead of white and shirks being walked down the aisle, is simply absurd. And a lie.

I don't need to call our wedding 'feminist' in order to convince myself that I'm somehow above the matrices of oppression. Being a transnational WOC, I nevertheless still benefit from heterosexism and cissexism. I recognize the blatant exploitation of largely poor POC by the US white-wedding industry, at the same I know that in Sri Lanka, weddings offer entrepreneurship opportunities for many people (including my aunt, who made a name for herself as a maekup artist). The issue of marriage and weddings is far more complex than some would have us believe, but if I label my wedding, my entrance into an inherently exclusionary institution as a 'feminist' act, then I am betraying many queer/ trans/ gay/lesbian/bi/ poor people, some of whom are friends and some of whom are blood, with whom I wish to be in solidarity with. And being in solidarity means allowing yourself to be called on your privilege, to acknowledge that in our flawed world, no choice is an innocent one.

Our wedding will represent many things: for me, it represents a country and culture that insists on surviving despite colonization and a civil war, it represents my family who are nothing short of amazing, it represents our belief that a different kind of relationship is possible between cismen and ciswomen. But until the doling out of human rights based on sexual affiliation is abolished, until everyone's chosen family is recognized and validated as worthy of protection, I won't be lying to myself about my wedding representing feminism or progressiveness. My wedding, my commitment is what it is, and I need neither white feminist approval or glamorizing in order to live with the reality of my decisions.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, Part I: Princesses and The Brown Girl's Dilemma

2011-01-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I came across an article on Racialicious about erotica writer Kama Spice. Kama talks eloquently about the power of women-centric erotica, and how she uses writing to heal from the wounds of sexism and racism. I was so intrigued after reading that I immediately purchased her novel 'Tia's War' in e-book form.
See I was always a fantasy-oriented gal. As far back as I can recall, I would indulge in these elaborate fantasies centered around me and my latest celebrity crush. I would be a beautiful warrior, an exquisitely anguished elven princess or a Jedi with long rippling hair. But when I took a Women's Studies class in college, I was introduced to a term that functioned as the proverbial light-bulb on my long time fantasy life: white-normativity. White normativity refers to a collection of processes whereby many of us are socialized into accepting 'white' as the norm, as simply and neutrally human. In every single one of my fantasy worlds, I had imagined myself as a white woman. In retrospect, I don't find this very surprising. Fantasy is, after all, about escape, mental pleasure,and the idealized re-imaginings of our desires in a world where we have the ultimate control over how those desires run their course.
What were my desires then and how did whiteness function as a receptacle? As a short, average-sized brown girl with bushy hair and thick eyebrows, with a penchant for toting hefty volumes of Shakespeare about school, I was far from the pinnacle of what was considered desirable. I would consume literature by Keats and Shelley, Lawrence and the Bronte sisters, and I would seethe with a passion and romantic desire that never came to fruition in the real world. I wanted the perfect love, the most unadulterated passion, and in order to get those things I instinctively conceived that I would have to become the most perfect, unadulterated woman: cis, white, fragile, blonde and able-bodied.

What does any of this have to do with Kama Spice and erotica? EVERYTHING. Like almost everything else in our post-colonial reality, 'fantasy' is often code for white people in white worlds living heroic lives we can all (supposedly) identify with. To this day I can thoroughly enjoy a well-crafted romance novel if the characters are at least somewhat believable, but look up historical romance or fantasy/sci-fi romance, and what are we inundated with? Lots and lots and lots of creamy-skinned women with long silky tresses, their bosoms heaving against velvet gowns. And that doesn't even touch on the erasure of queer desire and bodies from what we understand as conventional fantasy/romance.

I'm a strong believer in the power of fantasy; I think a robust fantasy life provides us with the ultimate safe space - our minds - within which to enact our desires, imagine their consequences, and test the many facets of our individual sexualities. In fact, one only need look at runaway corporate successes like 'Twilight' to recognize the power of fantasy. But it is the ultimate confirmation of hierarchy, that 'fantasy' is coded as white, cis and heterosexual and that those social identities are consumed by millions in a taken-for-granted context of ultimate desirability. In describing the power of literature, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie talks about "how vulnerable we are in the face of a story". How vulnerable we indeed are, within the raw and often unexamined spaces of our subconscious where desire lies hidden and hungry.

Now there may very well be folks for whom imagining themselves in a different racial body is not at all tied to real-life issues of self perception; I'm merely pointing out that for me, and I suspect a substantial number of others, equating the privileges, the immutability of whiteness with happiness and fulfillment, is all too often but a dark mirror of our everyday lives wherein our flesh-and-bones coded identities of brown or queer or disabled or trans painfully shape how we walk through this world. If we are not safe from the encroachment of ideologized, colonial whiteness into our most intimate selves - that space between dreaming and waking when we dare to look our desires naked in the eye - then how do we arm ourselves to face the realities of a neo-colonial world?

Between ivory princesses and Nordic elf-queens, the dark female body exists as the Other, the negative against which the construction of ideal (white) cis-womanhood - innocence, fragility, desirability- are culled and constructed. A simple glance at the signifying differences between Rapunzel and Mother Gothel in Disney's latest venture, "Tangled' illustrates this quite well. If one purpose of fantasy is providing escapism from a flawed world, it is absolutely necessary that everyone has tools to construct a fantasy world where they can be affirmed for everything they are, including their race. As we walk through a world where whiteness, thinness and cis-genderism is worshipped, for many of us, fantasizing about a better life where we are whiter, thinner, and more 'normal' is the insidious deepening of psychic wounds that eventually catch up with us.
And while writers like Frantz Fanon and Gloria Anzaldua have created trailblazing work based on decolonizing our psyches, Kama Spice and writers like her are doing the same invaluable work in an arena that's often reviled (especially in white feminist circles): pop-culture. You see, the dilemma for most white feminists is whether to reject or accept a cultural landscape where a particular form of white womanhood is predominant. For women of color, the struggle goes much deeper, as we must validate our own womanhood even as we must recognize the erasure of that womanhood in cultural sites that many of us enjoy or grew up with. We deserve an equal place at the table of fantasy and play and romance, and we deserve to own and nurture our desires free from colonialities that exploit our longings in order to perpetuate white heteropatriarchy.

Sri Lankans Know How to Party!

2011-01-09T20:02:00.000-08:00

The new year is barely underway and already there’s tons to rage about. This Chicano studies program in Arizona is under threat because as usual white people are threatened by the thought of empowered brown folks.

At the university I attend, the Multicultural Studies program is under attack by numerous white professors claiming that our knowledge is not as ‘real’ or ‘rigorous’ as theirs. Translate: only white people are allowed to teach about ‘other cultures’ because that way, supremacy remains unchallenged.

I was tempted to have my first post of the year be about calling out, yet again, the continued colonization of our minds, our bodies, our intimate spaces, our sense of self. But then I thought, hey, we have survived and are surviving despite the colonialities we must struggle through, and in that survival lies power and wisdom and beauty beyond anything whiteness can ever conceive, imitate or destroy. I write this post, my first post in the year 2011, in the spirit of acknowledging all the brown cultures that thrive and flourish and enrich the lives of their people. I write this post to unequivocally declare: Sri Lankans know how to PARTY!

I spent the holidays with my aunt’s family in Toronto, and we had a blast. In between the lounging and gorging on food and dancing, I noticed things about the way Sri Lankans party that struck me as never before. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, when we party we party with the whole family. There’s no looking for a babysitter so mom and dad can go out, no bemoaning the loss of a social life once you have kids, no worrying about whether the teenagers are out getting drunk and risking their lives driving home. That’s because most Sri Lankans I know, don’t go out to the bar to drink. We pour a glass while we cook, sip some wine before dinner, maybe even dance a tune or two before sitting down at the table. And when we party, like for Christmas or New Year, we either ask people over or they ask us over. Once again, the whole household. That’s right, kids, teenagers, toddlers, visiting relatives, cousins, EVERYONE. At Sri Lankan house parties, it’s not unusual to have kids dozing on the couches while their parents fire up the dance floor, or to have them grumbling sleepily as they’re loaded into the car for the ride back home. Oftentimes, my aunt would be the family designated driver for the evening; of course, when we have house parties, everyone in the house gets to throw one back.

White people often dismiss cultures of colour as too ‘traditional’, or patronizingly refer to us as ‘family-oriented’; oftentimes white feminists characterise us as too traditional and family oriented because our agenda for social justice doesn’t conform to white, western, individualism. Well in the traditional, family-oriented culture I grew up in, I learned to drink safely with my parents, I learned that dancing baila (a creolised dance inspired by the Portuguese kaffringa) doesn’t require classes or prowess, only the willingness to laugh. And I also learned that everyone has a role to play in maintaining community, even though this involves occasionally sitting through parties one would rather not attend, because at the end of the day most people will have your back when shit hits the fan. I learned that nothing brings people together like homemade food prepared with love. When the Sri Lankan cricket team beat the racist Australian team to take home the 1996 Cricket World Cup, I remember being 10 years old and sitting around with my parents and cousins, seeing them pump their fists to Oye Ojaye by The Gypsies, and learning what national pride means to brown people.

And I learned that among ourselves, sharing the food and music we love, us brown people can empower, enrich and sustain each other to survive a white supremacist world with joy and dignity. And as I write this I know that this is why we NEED to continue fighting for our right to teach, learn about and love our cultures, to empower others and decolonize our lives. The revolution is here and now; the revolution is us.

This last video is dedicated to any fellow Lankans reading this who enjoy a good baila beat. Suba aluth awurudak weva! Happy New Year everybody!

Unpacking the Cis-Hetero Knapsack

2010-11-26T22:39:00.000-08:00

**this post is dedicated to my friends S.B, S.R, J.B, and M.B who daily inspire me with their courage, humor, warmth and allyhood. And to my brave, brave little brother, D**

Recently, the boyfriend and I were discussing white privilege and family dynamics in multiracial families. Our discussion culminated with us both reading over Peggy McIntosh's article on unpacking the knapsack of white privilege. At the end of her list, she talks about how writing down her privileges, enumerating them systematically, made them unavoidably, viscerally real to her. And so I started thinking, what privileges do I walk around with, encoded in my body, that are invisble to me? What follows is a result of this rumination. I decided to unpack my knapsack of cis/hetero privilege, and do it in a public forum so I can remind myself to always be accountable to the words I'm publicly attesting to. The list was intended primarily to enumerate my cis privilege, but of course it's almost impossible for me to seperate my cis identity from my heterosexuality. So here goes:

1) I can openly, freely declare my identity as a woman and not be questioned/ harassed/ laughed at/ threatened

2) I can choose sexual partners in the assurance that they are comfortable with how my genitalia "corresponds" to their expectations of my gender presentation

3) I don't ever have to think about the life-threatening consequences of disrupting the expectation listed above

4) If I wanted breast augmentation/ reduction, lyposuction, botox, vagina-lift, or laser hair removal, I will not have to go through mandatory evaluative therapy beforehand

6) Most of the procedures for enhancing femme, cisgender identity (like those listed above) are fairly affordable and widely provided by physicians

5) My form of gender identity is not listed as a disorder on the DSM of the American Psychological Association

6) I can indulge my particular aesthetic need for feminine apparel 24/7, 365 days of he year, in any social or private setting

7)I can have my pick of gynecologists without worrying about their reaction to my genitalia

8) I can go to most hospitals/ doctors reasonably assured that my genitalia won't count against me

9) If I choose to become pregnant, I won't be called "monstrous", "freak of nature" etc

10) I can freely contemplate pregnancy without also thinking about my gender identity/ presentation

11) I can legally marry my partner

12) When we walk down the street holding hands, we are fairly safe from harrasment

13) We can be publicly affectionate without worrying about our gender presentation inviting unwanted attention

14) In Women's Studies classes, I can be assured of cis-female experience being widely discussed/ represented/ centred

15) I can join in discussions about sex/ sexuality and be assured that most people won't look askance at me

16) I can enjoy most forms of media without worry that my sexual/ gender identity is caricactured/ reviled/ constructed as 'false' or 'misleading'

17) I can sit/ stand/ dance/ walk/ talk the way I'm comfortable without my gender identity being questioned and my physical safety threatened

18) I can CHOOSE whether to support transphobic events like the Michigan Womyn's Folk Festival

19) I'm fairly assured that I wouldn't be questioned about my participation in "women's rights" issues

20) When women's issues come up, whether in the media, in informal settings, in academia etc I can be assured that I count under the label 'woman'

21) I can browse clothing stores/ try dresses and shoes on, without inviting suspicion and harassment

22) I can secure a passport, driver's license, state-issued ID etc that matches my lived gender identity

23) As far as my gender identity is concerned, I can travel without fear of detainment/ harssment/ embarassment

As you can tell, this a bit rough, but I've committed myself to continuing this list and writing down more instances of my cis/hetero pivilege as they come up.

I’m Sorry Whiteness, You Can’t have Everything

2010-10-24T19:42:00.001-07:00

Cultural appropriation. The race-relations hotbed of our time. We've all been guilty of it at some point. When we live in a globalized marketplace that's constantly revamping its buffet to pique our capricious consumerism, it's hard not to be.

Even though many a blogger has tackled this issue numerous times, I have to say my piece because, despite numerous bloggers cited above, white folks in the general western hemisphere still INSIST that cultural appropriation is either a)harmless

b) just POC being oversensitive

c)paying a compliment

Before I plunge in, I'm going to offer a general explanation of cultural appropriation: it's when the dominant culture adopts symbols, iconography, customs, crafts etc created by a subordinate culture, without either gaining permission, giving credit, honoring the true spirit of the culture or ensuring that members of the subordinate culture are equally represented in the mainstream. It's like hey, we like the yoga stuff, but not so much the brown people that created it.

Now, a personal example to illustrate. Last week, the boyfriend and I were hitching a ride with some folks. Myself, the boyfriend, and our friend Y were the people of color in the car. The other girl, whom I shall call Genteel White Lady, continued to speak Spanish almost the entire time to Y. My partner, who identifies as Latino, grew up in a Midwestern white family, and therefore is not fluent in Spanish.

For those who are wondering where this is going: for many people of color, language is a painful, poignant issue. Many of us have had our parents’ languages forced out of us through English-privileging education systems. Or, we have internalized so much shame and hatred about our native languages from the white colonial legacy, that reclaiming our mother tongues is a lifelong, painful, complex process. Language anchors our history, our memory, our connection to community; the loss and dispossession of language entails a lifetime of anguish. For the Latin@/Chican@ community in the US, English-only programs and corporal punishment by white teachers ensured that entire generations grew up without the words to speak with their grandparents. Reclaiming language and celebrating bilingualism is therefore tied to the collective decolonization of communities of color.

When Genteel White Lady proceeded to blithely showcase her Spanish skills, ignoring the fact that my partner could not participate in the conversation, she was appropriating cultural prerogative. She was displaying her ignorance of the history of the Spanish language in the United States. So here’s someone who’s studied Spanish for years, without ever considering the issue of appropriation and privilege that reap her Genteel White Lady self adulation for being ‘well-rounded’ while stigmatizing the same language in brown-skinned people.

It gets worse.

Turns out that Genteel White Lady travelled to Latin America with her church, where she was moved beyond her Genteel White Lady self could explain by how ‘the people” are “so happy, even though they have nothing”. She thus took it upon herself to learn Spanish so she could continue to flit around the globe (as those with US passports can) and partake of this wonderful jubilance so inherent in formerly colonized people.

So, not only is Genteel White Lady benefitted immeasurably by the same historic conditions that ensure people in certain countries “have nothing”, but she is able to speak for those people and assure herself that they are, indeed, happy and content.

Words cannot even begin to encapsulate my rage and frustration. If anger could cause spontaneous combustion, the car would have exploded into a mushroom cloud of flaming gasoline at the precise moment those words fell like dainty pearls from Genteel White Lady’s lips.

I’m sorry white peeps. I know it’s hard having an identity that’s negatively defined. I know that white culture is produced and reproduced as utterly normal and unflavored, so that the rest of us can be racialized and othered. I know that our brown people culture is super attractive and sparkly, and we always seem so pleased by your white attention that it almost seems rude NOT to speak for us or mimic our customs.

But, cultural appropriation is real, it’s happening, and it’s RACIST.

People of color have survived centuries of unspeakable violence against our cultures and our spirits. The cultures we have built today, in all their vibrancy and richness, are testaments to our strength and survival. Therefore, they have incredible meaning to us. When white folks just put them on like a pair of shoes, they neutralize years of resistance and celebration.

The day when all peoples have equal access to large-scale media, when all peoples can travel with the same freedom, when all peoples have equal and humanized representation in the global cultural landscape, THEN we can talk about cultural exchange and how cultures can benefit from influencing each other.

Until then, it’s just plain stealing.

I Won't be Your Flavor of the Month

2010-09-23T18:10:00.000-07:00

Figuring out transnational race politics is no easy task. Race, like other systems of oppression, shifts and alters with geography, with time, with culture, with context. The way I experience race in the US, where I'm usually primarily seen as a woman of color (with my nationality/ ethnicity being secondary), differs from Dubai where my dark-skin and South Asianness is emphasized, which differs from Sri Lanka where I'm part of the ethnic majority and therefore privileged.
What inspired this blog post though, is a trend I've noticed lately in Hollywood that corresponds with something long prevalent in Sri Lankan communities I've lived in. In regards to Hollywood, I like to call this the 'ethnic lite' phenomenon. You know what I'm talking about. The one where it's trendy and desirable to have 'ethnic' features like full lips and curvy bottoms, so long as you're still white enough to be, well, white.
Think Angelina Jolie as Cleopatra. Think the swooning over 'dark beauties' like Megan Foxx. Think WOC celebrities like Beyonce, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Lopez and Jessica Alba having to blond up and tone d0wn before going mainstream. Racialicious had a great post on how, when it comes to models of color, the fashion industry wants "white girls dipped in chocolate". I can't even list the number of nauseating articles I've come across in mainstream media outlets about how fashion is 'diversifying' and reflecting a globalized culture, when what's actually happening is WOC with sufficiently Eurocentric features are being exalted, with a particular emphasis on racial' 'ambiguity' and a fetish for 'exotic' mixed-race heritage that's actually extremely dehumanizing and reductive of the experience of multiracial people. This latest article by CNN basically sums up a disgusting, neo-colonialist, racist trend that's taken shape: where 'ethnic' features are commodified and appropriated, and used as weapons of further marginalization against the very people they once helped racialize. Now, WOC are measured not only against the white woman ideal, but against other WOC who fit the image of 'exotic' other.

How does this fit with my experience in Sri Lanakn communities? Let me explain. One of my many Sri Lankan friends has gorgeous golden skin, high cheekbones and a dancer's body. She in fact bears a striking resemblance to Jennifer Lopez. Whenever Sri Lankan people talk about her obvious beauty, they fall back on how great it is that she looks ethnically ambiguous i.e she could be from any number of countries between Asia and the Middle-east. This quality is seen as extremely desriable.

Pictured on top is the most popular beauty queen in Sri Lanka right now, Jacqueline Fernandez. Sri Lankan people I know, are almost uniformly crazy about her. They fawn over her height, her slenderness and her wonderfully light skin. They talk about how she is a 'true beauty'.

While I concede that Miss.Fernandez is quite beautiful, I object to the standards in our society that value her beauty above others. She is actually part Malaysian, which is something else Sri Lankans seem to drool over: mixed ethnicity. People will say 'oooh, she looks that way because her father is XYZ or her mother is YYX', or ' she is part Sri Lankan and part-xxx, she is sooo beautiful'.

I'm not setting up to police who can identify as Sri Lankan, or who's an 'authentic' woman of color. What I'm trying to draw attention to is the way Hollywood fetishizes race ambiguity and exotic looks in ways that marginalize those of us who aren't ambiguous or exotic; just like Sri Lankan society exalts mixed-ethnic looks among its community in a way that suggests, to me, that we should aim to dilute our ethnic traits in favor of the cosmopolitan, race-ambiguous look of Jacqueline Fernandez. If the primary reason we swoon over multiracial beauty is because we think it edges us that much closer to whiteness, then we have a problem.
I have brown skin that gets darker brown in the summer. My hair is thick and strong. I'm very short. I look nothing like Jacqueline Fernandez, and neither do many of my friends (some of whom are mixed heritage). I refuse to stay silent in the face of our collective post-colonial brainwashing that elevates one kind of Sri Lankan beauty over another.

In Dubai, many Sri Lankan women are employed as domestic workers, largely in Arab or white households. When people in Dubai have told me (and it's happened a lot) "You don't look Sri Lankan at all!" they expect me to respond like they've just paid me a compliment. Because of the high number of our women employed in domestic work, and because it's perfectly naturally all over the world to view dark, poor women as born to serve the needs of those that are lighter and richer, most people are surprised when faced with a Sri Lankan woman who is not under their power, and who can look them in the eye and demand access to the same things they have.

But many of us middle class to upper class Sri Lankans, when faced with these stereotypes, are quick to say 'Not all Sri Lankan women are maids' or 'Many of us are very well educated' or 'They look that way because they are gamay (village) people'.
Why this apologetic tone? Why the back-pedaling? What's wrong with looking like our women who labor under dehumanizing conditions to generate one of the biggest sources of revenue for our country? ( women employed outside the country remit a large amount of their money back home).
What's wrong, in fact, with these women? Can it be that they remind us, that despite our designer clothes and Western accents, that we come from a land of dark people and that our shared history is one of oppression and colonization based on darkness? Maybe it's because we know, in our heart of hearts, that our class privilege and education and conformity buys us that much into whiteness, while many of our men and women live and die under the shadow of racist colonialism that STILL devalues dark bodies.

So here's me doing my bit to counteract the brainwashing we all participate in. I look Sri Lankan. I look South Asian. I am dark. I have thick hair that gets bushy.
Dark is beautiful. Sri Lankanness, in its MANY shapes and forms, is beautiful. I won't be commodified and appropriated into white patriarchy's latest fantasy, and I refuse to see such commodification as positive in any way.

So let's stop pretending that Hollywood's latest fetish is a step forward. I want real representation on screen, one that doesn't box in, mislabel and exoticise my multiracial brothers and sisters. One that doesn't deploy colonial race politics that tear us further apart. One that's really committed to honoring our humanity.

Anything less is just not good enough.

White Feminists and Me: a Fable of Solidarity

2010-09-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Multiracial/ multicultural relationships are TOUGH. There’s no way around that. Multiracial relationships in the US, where all of us are consciously or subconsciously haunted by a history of segregation, slavery and racialized politics, are even more so.

The reason I’m writing this post is because I think we need another reminder of how important, nay essential, honesty is when engaging in multiracial relationships. So in the spirit of honesty, I realized I need to blog about my friendships with white feminists. I’ve arrived at these conclusions/ interpretations after months of self-reflection, and while I’m not suggesting that my experience typifies everyone’s, it’s been comforting to have other WOC acknowledge parallels to my feelings.

Firstly, a little background for context: before coming to the US, I never had white friends. While there is a sizeable population of white folks in Dubai, economic stratification ensures their residence in exclusive suburbs, while I grew up in the teeming, claustrophobic city heart. My graduating class in high school boasted no less than 80 different nationalities. Bilingualism was the norm, rather than the exception, and most people were closer to tri- lingual. Simply put, diversity was a fact of life. I had friends from Sudan, Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Tanzania and many many more. My close group of friends is all women of color, and while our experiences in Dubai were mediated through colorism, lookism and other currents of discrimination, there was no steep difference in privilege as often manifests between white women and WOC.

When I moved to the US almost 4 years ago, I was lost. I had no friends or family here, and it took many many hard months before I was myself again. When I discovered Women’s Studies and feminism, I discovered a source of immense comfort and empowerment, as well as a sense of community with feminists and progressives et al.

I grew close to a number of white feminists, and for a while I was happily assured that their professed allyhood and my own racial identity development meant that our friendships were foolproof. And so when cracks developed in those friendships, and I found myself feeling betrayed on several fronts, I was at last compelled to take a long hard look at the emotional realities I had avoided.

For some reason, in my friendships with white women, I had implicitly decided not to think about race between us. I could talk about critical race theory, I could talk about my experience of racism in other places and at the hands of other people, but to personalize that in the immediate moment, and to acknowledge the insidiousness of race, invisible and ubiquitous as air, that permeated the interaction between me and the person in front of me – I just couldn’t do it.

And that was a grave error.

The result was that oftentimes, I became the receptacle of their white guilt, or would prioritize affirming their Good White Person qualities over honestly engaging my own positionality. So there I was, a fiercely empowered brown woman, trampling and ignoring my feelings so that I could ensure the white women felt good.

Now, I’m aware that my personality traits also factor into the dynamic: I am, by nature, averse to conflict, diplomatic to a fault and much too eager to bestow unadulterated trust. But I can’t ignore how my race impacts these qualities, particularly in the US, or how seemingly innocuous traits can end up feeding into racial narratives. Isn’t that part of how racism operates? Our actions and motivations aren’t insular; rather they are constantly being woven into a vicious social narrative bent on uplifting the powerful. This doesn’t mean we don’t have agency, but it does mean that we must constantly gauge the narratives into which our actions are falling. If we find our actions continuously shaping a particular harmful narrative, it’s time to pause and reflect.

It took me a long time to realize the racial dynamic I had fed into: I had become the Safe Brown Person, someone that white women could process their guilt and privilege with because I was too nice to call them out on it. I was so desperate to bond over our shared ideals of social justice, to have the same effortlessly close friendships I share with my Dubai friends, that I was living the ‘I-don’t-see-race’ theory even as I was loudly decrying its facetiousness in the context of social policy.

‘People need to WAKE UP and see that race is everywhere!’ I would declare, while simultaneously ignoring race in one of the places it mattered most.

For the white women I was friends with, my cheerful acquiescence meant, oftentimes, that their allyhood to me as a WOC only needed to exist theoretically:

“I consider myself in solidarity with you” (but really I see you as helpless and dependent.)

“I’m so glad we’re friends” (but I don’t attribute the same agency and strength to your decisions as I do to mine.)

“We’re strong women and we’re here for each other” (except I can only really relate to you when you’re a dependent victim, and once you start coming into your own and being strong and happy, suddenly it’s too difficult to relate)

“I would never want you to feel burdened by my white guilt” (btw, one of my friends needs to process their white privilege and none of her friends are having it, but I told her you would help).

These and others were many instances wherein my actions helped solidify a debilitating racial narrative: one in which the complex negotiation between allyhood and friendship, between camaraderie and privilege, was sidestepped for an easy assurance that, ultimately, kept me locked in a cycle of self-deprecation, self-doubt and subordination.

So my learning experience concludes thusly: never again will I allow my conflict-aversive nature ascendancy over articulating my reality. No more will I centralize the hurt feelings of white feminists. And finally, I’m through with the mistaken belief that race is a burden that’s best ignored or downplayed for a relationship to thrive.

For white feminists who want to befriend WOC: come to me when you’re confident that you’re white guilt is under control; when you feel it acting up, please check the urge to tearfully burden me with it, and instead get thee to a white caucus post haste. If you’re ‘projecting’ past hurts and issues onto my reality, and that interferes with us connecting: stop doing it, simple as that. I don’t let racism stand in the way of attempting to be your friend, so just, please, suck it up. If you can’t decenter your feelings and experiences in a friendship, then you need to do some self-reflection. Just because I don’t call you on shit sometimes, doesn’t mean I’m not hurt/ alienated by what you just said or did.

Also, living a transnational existence is damn hard, harder than anything I will ever do in my lifetime, and to endure it with hope and love takes more strength than you can imagine. For this, I deserve to not be seen as your poor exotic Third World sister who needs sheltering. For this I deserve your respect, your recognition of our ‘equal humanity’, if nothing else.

Racism and kyriarchy fucks us all up. I know I stumble over my own privileges: my able-bodied privilege, my thin privilege, my class privilege, my heterosexual privilege, my cis privilege. But it’s time we did away with superficial notions of kumbaya sisterhood, and started holding each other accountable. I’m ready for real, gritty, sometimes-we-yell-at-each-other, blood n’sweat solidarity.

There’s no other kind worth having.

Racism and Social Responsibility, aka Why I can't 'just enjoy' a movie

2010-08-07T04:31:00.000-07:00

“Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.”
-Kahlil Gibran

So I’ve been home (in Dubai) for July, and as per tradition, my brother and I bond by watching horror flicks. He is a horror aficionado and continuously scours the Internet for whatever creepy fare celluloid has to offer. I myself enjoy a well-made scare, and I list “The Omen” and “The Ring” among my favorite movies.

But, being a committed social analyst, I can’t ever just ‘turn off’ my perspective when I’m watching a movie. Consequently, I have always been fascinated by how horror movies employ otherness to maximize fear and revulsion in their audience. The filmic devices employed to create horror, say a great deal about what the filmmakers’ intended audience is, and their assumptions about what things are commonly feared and reviled.

Race, gender and sexuality are often deployed, both subtly and overtly, in the delineation of monsters, killers, rapists, ghosts, werewolves, vampires et al. In the context of US race relations, horror/ fantasy flicks are a prime medium for examining how white privilege/ normativity is constructed, perpetuated and reinforced. Additionally, considering that horror flicks are often touted as cathartic experiences, we need to question how our fear, suspense and culminating relief are orchestrated, and how this reflects our real-world approach to crime, deviance and punishment.

Whenever POC talk about racism in movies, naysayers are quick to retaliate with ‘oh whatever, it’s just fantasy’ or ‘there are white villains/killers/ psychopaths too’. What they don’t acknowledge, is that whiteness is not what’s employed to create fear and disgust. In Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, mental illness is the horror. In the recent flick ‘Orphan‘, an un-American, Eastern-European quality are the markers of otherness.

It’s the ultimate evidence of white privilege that whiteness itself always escapes scrutiny, at the expense of scapegoating femaleness, or sexuality, or class, or, in the case of serial killers, mental illness/ disability. The perpetrators are othered as so mentally ill or deformed that they are beyond humanity. By this convenient scapegoating, not only is the hierarchy of bodies enforced and perpetuated, but we as a society are made to feel no accountability for the crimes being perpetrated. I am a firm believer in the fact that crimes, no matter how heinous or beyond the pale of humanity they seem, are always a reflection of the society they are committed in.

**spolier warning for 'Orphan'*

In ‘Orphan’, the eponymous character is a young girl who in fact, is not a young girl at all, but a 30 year old woman with a rare hormonal condition that inhibits physical development. The woman/girl is revealed as a deranged, cold-blooded, manipulative killer; she tries to seduce her adopted father, and, enraged by his rejection, sets out to murder the whole family. The movie tells us that this is a pattern of previous murders committed by her after escaping from an asylum.
The movie never prompts the audience to consider how social construction of illness, disability and gender, as well as the inhumane conditions of asylums, might play a hand: she is mentally ill/ non-normatively bodied, and we need nothing else to convince us of her evilness.
With vampire extravaganzas like ‘Twilight’ and ‘Dracula’, white, male, able-bodied hegemony is firmly centered. It’s no coincidence that pop culture has never welcomed a female vampire who can wield potency and charm like Edward Cullen and Dracula, and that vampire culture (the ‘ Volturi’ in Meyers’ work and ‘The Coven of the Articulate’ in Anne Rice) is almost invariably European. White, male, upper-class bodies having unearthly power seems normal, nay highly desirable, in a society where white male supremacy is so deeply entrenched. The Volturi and the Cullens are considered sophisticated, classical, admirable: their whiteness absolves the horror of vampirism.
I mentioned earlier that even the most horrific crimes imaginable can be attributed (in my view) to social patterns and conditioning. Rape, battery, torture and serial murder are not simply the results of mental illness/ poverty/ or any other form of socially constructed deviance. They occur in relationship to their environment; in a society built on forcible domination of bodies, it takes no large stretch of the imagination to conceive how rapists and killers are made. Did you see that I said ‘made’ and not ‘born’? I think the diction is an important reminder for us that none of us are wholly innocent, and the more terrible an act of violence is, the deeper should be our scrutiny and self-reflection about the kind of society we have built and want to perpetuate.

Note: I think I first came across the term ‘hierarchy of bodies’ in one of Renee Martin’s posts on Womanist Musings. It’s a great term for describing how oppression functions, and I wanna make sure she gets cred for it.

What if I don't want a national anthem at all?

2010-07-25T12:33:00.000-07:00

‘The old lie, ‘Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori’
Wilfred Owen

Yesterday, I came across this article.

The article describes how Professor Timothy Askew, a professor at Clark Atlanta University, a black college, is uncomfortable with the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing", a popular spiritual, being recognized as the ‘Black national anthem’. His worry? That the song might be ‘construed as racially separatist and divisive’. I was quite furious by the time I finished the article, so much so that I didn’t trust myself to blog about the issue. But after some though, I decided this needs to be said:

WHY do we not label white folks as ‘separatist’ and ‘divisive’ for adopting ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, a poem written by a white man, as the national anthem? Why, despite the fact that lines like “the land of the free and the home of the brave?” ignore and erase the realities of people of color in the US, sidestep the inconvenient truth that the star-spangled banner waves over the genocide and dispossession of First Nations people, is the song wordlessly embraced as capturing the ‘true’ spirit of America? Why is a song written by and for white people entrenched in American consciousness as the national anthem, when a song written by and for black people is accused of peddling divisive racial politics?

Dare I suggest, dear post-racial America, that the United States is first and primarily understood as a country of white folks, into which the rest of us are grudgingly permitted entry based on our ‘merit’?

I’m not discrediting Prof. Askew’s scholarship or his cognizance of his people’s history. In fact, I think this was also an instance of a media outlet trying to push the ridiculous ‘color-blind-we’re-all-the-same-let’s-do-away-with-race’ BULLSHIT that America is enamored of. It’s funny, isn’t it, how the call to ‘do away with race’ seems to crop up when POC want to talk about the realities of race in ‘the land of the free’, while the overrepresentation of whites in positions of wealth and power goes unnoticed? But hey, that’s not racism, that’s just the way things are.
Predictably, the comments section of the CNN article abounds with complaints of whites being shortchanged because federal money is ‘set aside’ for minorities, and appeals of ‘can we please just stop talking about race?’.

The article ends with this quote from Prof. Askew "I know people will probably think that I'm a sellout, but I think it is important that African-Americans nationally understand that we should be moving towards racial cohesiveness."
This would be all well and good. Except that POC aren’t the ones standing in the way of ‘racial cohesiveness’, whatever the hell that means. What exactly does ‘racial cohesiveness’ look like for Askew? Is it POC becoming absorbed under the genocidal banner of white American expansionist history, so that we forget struggles for racial and economic justice that were led by POC and founded upon a critique of the nation-state as a tool of oppression? Should we just forget the rich history of struggle in the US by POC and their allies against white supremacist capitalism, struggles premised on challenging the dominant ideology of home and country, struggles in fact inspired by and linked to the struggles of POC and Indigenous people WORLDWIDE against US-European imperialism?

The article also quotes conservative African-American blogger Kenneth Durden as saying "He (Dr. King) was a patriot and he never wanted blacks to deny or separate themselves from being American”. I don’t profess to know the minutiae of Dr. King’s thoughts on nationalism/ patriotism, but I do know that he was deeply moved by his travels to India and the poverty he witnessed. I know that he insisted on challenging the US involvement in Vietnam, when many counseled him to abandon this ‘unpopular’ position. Clearly, he had some inkling of the interconnectedness of social justice issues. What if, as Askew and Durden seem to want, we woke up tomorrow to find all POC in the US suddenly absorbed into its institutions, as many POC CEOs, as many POC politicians, as many POC generals and government contractors? The struggle would be over, right? POC can enthusiastically wave the star spangled banner over their slice of the American dream, and have equal share in the neo-imperialism and rampant capitalism of the US military industrial complex. Right?

Somehow, I don’t think that’s quite what Dr. King had in mind.

I have never been comfortable with the way patriotism and nationalism is popularly constructed. Too often, they sit smack in the intersections of masculinity, power, xenophobia, sexism and religious fundamentalism. In my own country, Sri Lanka, political pundits have often hijacked our national discourse into one of Sinhala supremacy and colonial-era posturing. I have run into arguments with many Sinhala people who informed me that if I really loved Sri Lanka, I would stop ‘siding’ with the UN against our government and stop all the ridiculous talk about investigating war crimes and genocide.
So what does this mean for me, a transnational Sinhalese woman fiercely aligned with womanist decolonization?
Well, it DOESN’T mean I don’t feel a tug-in-the-belly love for Sri Lanka, too deep for tears, comforted by the timeless green of coconut trees. It doesn’t mean I don’t get as excited and rowdy as the next fan when our team takes home a cricket championship. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel, after years away, a palpable longing to breathe the air and taste the water of the place I was born in.

It’s hard to love your country in a world where borders are drawn like battle lines in the ground, and the binary of ‘us versus them’ is constantly upheld, repackaged and enforced as the only way to be patriotic. It’s hard to embrace your nationality and citizenship, when you see that its construction has been at the expense and dispossession of millions of others. Even as I write this blog entry, there are thousands of civilians from Jaffna, classified as IDPs (internally displaced persons), living in government camps where they can’t even piss and shit without being watched over by an armed soldier. What does patriotism mean to them, faced with the prospect of never returning to their homes? I can and will wax eloquent about Sri Lanka matha (Mother Lanka): about the hand-sown, luminescent rice paddies, the saris bright as butterfly wings, our incorrigibly close-knit families, our love of food and drink and community. But I will also hold myself accountable to those people for who Mother Lanka is, at best, a desperate vision in a waning dream. To borrow from a speech by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, because there is no ‘one story’ of Sri Lanka, there is also no one way to love it.

The United States is also not a monolith: it , too, is a country of multiple histories, stories and peoples. But all too often, the history of whiteness becomes codified as the only history, with inserts of ‘Black history’ and ‘Asian-American history’ et al for a cosmetic diversity. Even in the discipline of ‘Ethnic Studies’, one encounters the occasional theorist citing ‘America is a nation of immigrants’, thereby invisibilizing the history and sovereignty of First Nations people. The privileges of nationality and citizenship are manifold, and it’s easy to forget, when scrambling for our share of those privileges, that human dignity and freedom should not be contingent on a stamp in your passport, nor should it be geographically located.

The fact that jazz singer Rene Marie was criticized as ‘unpatriotic’ for singing ‘Lift Every Voice’ instead of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ at a mayoral inauguration, is glaring proof that many have a stake in codifying ONE history and identity of the US.

I suspect these ‘patriots’ and those that line their wallets realize that if people finally rejected binary thinking and asserted the complex interrelationship of human existence, they (the elite) would lose their death-grip on the world’s resources. The ruling classes everywhere have a stake in policing national borders and propagating an exclusivist national identity, because fear and hatred divides people and prevents them from uniting for social, racial, and economic justice. If we the people re-construed notions of citizenship and belonging, we would start clamoring for freedoms all over the world, and joining our voices together across the divisive construction of borders and states.

And we can’t have that now, can we?

"The Art of Living", Womanist edition

2010-07-19T23:53:00.000-07:00

This piece was inspired by a conversation with an amazing feminist ally and a wonderful friend, Jennifer S. Thanks ladybug!

When I enrolled in Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies classes, I felt reawakened, I felt a palpable and poignant connection to the world. It was this sense of rejuvenation and connection that echoed in my soul and solidified my trust in anti-oppressive struggle as valuable, necessary and a path to living more fully. But, for over a year, I closed myself into a cocoon vision of feminism and social justice. I was just untangling myself from a sexually and emotionally exploitative relationship, and I sought refuge in a bubble of radicalism, plunging myself into intense post-colonial/ feminist theory and aspiring to an almost ascetic ideological purity. My heady intake of anti-oppression theory pushed me dangerously close to self-righteousness, and instead of engaging with people by acknowledging the many contradictions and challenges inherent in social justice work, I resorted merely to critiquing perceived privilege and using my observations to justify an unyielding anger.

I am aware of the empowering and liberating potential of anger. For women of color, acknowledging the source of our pain, woundedness and rage is the first step in a long journey of decolonization. But the anger I clung to had outlived its purpose. The enclosure I needed to heal and regroup had become a restrictive illusion of separatism that rejected the challenges of lived womanism.

I raged, I criticized, I lost patience, I shunned challenges. I thought I had all the answers.
I’m not sure what exactly it was that nudged me out of my cocoon. Possibly it began with my trip to Sri Lanka, my first in five years. As always, I was moved beyond words by the beauty of my small island nation. After over 30 years of war, we were finally ‘at peace’. People were hopeful and exuberant. It was impossible not to delve into the inexplicable beauty and warmth my country radiated around me. I would wake up in the morning and walk outside to collect sepalika blossoms from the ground. The delicate white flowers with their hearts of fire and heavenly fragrance, bloomed at night and fell to the ground by daybreak.

I felt a wholeness I couldn’t name. What could my esoteric theory offer the nineteen year old soldiers standing by roadsides, armed with rifles far bulkier than their slender shoulders? Or the tender-faced girl with an infant in her arms, enduring the blast of tropical noon to beg on the sidewalk? Or my cheerful grandmother Indrani, who had lived through the breadlines and the rations and the endless power-hungry politicians and soldiers and curfews, who said simply “All I want is peace in my country”, who still listened intently to my anger at the human rights abuses and genocide of our government.?

I had to at last acknowledge that while theory is powerful, engaging with life is even more so.
I started to identify as a Womanist. I began thinking more deeply about what it means to inhabit a flawed world as a flawed being, while simultaneously striving for a richer, more sustainable, more life-giving future for all.

I fell in love.

I listened to these lines by Suheir Hammad over and over:
“…as we lay and love/ our touch is not free/ it comes with responsibility”.

I resolved to reach out to people, even people who didn’t identify as feminist or womanist or anti-racist. People who are just doing what they know is right for themselves and their communities. Sometimes this means I get hurt and disillusioned. Sometimes, I’m so overwhelmed I need to go to the thrift store and pick out a terrible, terrible romance novel with a title like “Snowed in with the Boss” and just laugh my ass off. Other times, I’m touched with a hope that rekindles purpose.

When I heard the amazing Karen Diver speak a few months ago, she reiterated the importance of self-care, of remembering that social justice is but a part of our multifaceted identities. I am a Womanist, and I’m also a daughter, a writer, a partner, a sister, a Tolkien geek, a city girl, a Sinhalese woman, a Gulf baby, a transnational woman. Social justice can enrich and inform these other parts, but sometimes I just need to honor them for themselves. Sometimes I need to talk about wedding saris with my mother and grandmother. Sometimes **shudder**, I watch Paris Hilton movies with my brother.

What I’m driving at here is that ascetic purity is only one way to live your truth (and I’m not even sure it’s high on the how-to list). We inhabit a world ravaged by unspeakable, human-created evils: poverty, genocide, colonization, environmental degradation, rape, murder, violence. We who insist on envisioning a different world, who must insist against desperate odds that yes, a different world is possible, we need to also create beauty, tenderness, melody, and redolence around us.

We need to fill our daily lives with material glimpses of what we are fighting for.
How can we arm ourselves everyday to battle the dragon of racist, sexist, colonialist capitalism, if we have no gardens to return to?
For a long time I was incapacitated by anger and an inability to move past my privileges. Because of my guilt at being heterosexual, cisgender and middle-class, I was convinced that I should indulge no sensory craving, because the beauty I crave is built on the backs of my sisters and brothers in the global South. But I was only envisioning a small piece of the picture: the piece was consumerism. What I needed to do, was what Audre Lorde laid out many years ago in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power”, when she said:

“The aim of each thing we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible”.

Now, I must relearn to use “the erotic as power”. I say ‘relearn’ because it was never unknown, only forgotten, despised, suppressed, abnegated.

I must learn, not only to see the world, but to touch, taste and breathe it. While I decolonize my mind, I must also locate resistance in my body. Because resistance comes not from shunning the world and using anger as a shield between myself and the necessary realities of living – but from everyday choices, both personal and political, that refuse to disown a world despite the toxicity of oppression permeating the air. Choices that insist on our rights to love, play, laugh, dance, eat and seek pleasure. Choices made in the fullest possible consciousness of our interconnectedness.

Choices that affirm human comfort, human joy, and human pleasure as a RIGHT, sacrosanct and immitigable – choices premised on moving towards a future where basic human dignity is not the privilege of a few built on the backs of others, but the inalienable birthright of all.
Audre, Audre, Audre it’s almost as if I can feel your presence, your hand on my shoulder. Your truth and mine are not identical, but your voice echoes deep enough to make my bones shift, as if relearning the frame of my flesh.

These choices look different for each of us, because they are formed out of the incredibly beautiful multiplicity of human experience. But for each of us, they are as necessary and life-giving as air

Speak your truth. Live it. Reflect on it. Love it. Understand its nature and texture, like lips on a lover’s skin. Relearn its imprint on your body.

“Now hold me, a little while longer
Just a bit
Cos we gotta get up soon
There’s a war on outside
C’mon now baby.
We got work to do.”

-Suheir Hammad

Different Kind of Border Patrol (Of Bodies and Borders Part III)

2010-05-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

As a decolonizing Womanist, global race relations are something I try processing every day. I spent most of my life in Dubai, which was, among many things a transnational hub made up of a largely expatriate community, a capitalist’s wet dream, and a city of labor abuses so appalling that the government engages in active misinformation about the reality of human rights violations.

Even before I attended college and read critical race theory / post-colonial theory and politicized my experience, I lived with a burgeoning sense of frustration, of limitedness, of anger. I realize now that this comes from being a marginalized body. What I want to discuss in this post is how marginalized bodies experience restrictions on their mobility that privileged bodies never have to consider. For example: I am attending college in the United States, and once a year I visit my family in Dubai. My family is middle-to-upper middle class and can afford to fund my plane tickets. But, if I want to transit through Amsterdam, Frankfurt, or Heathrow, I need an ‘airport transit visa’. This is a visa stamp you have to obtain on your passport from the embassy of the respective European country. It costs close to 200$ and is only valid for one transit. So if you have a return ticket, you need to obtain a transit visa for the way back. The visa section of German, Dutch and most European embassies are only open for about four hours a day, which is your only window for getting an appointment so you can pay them 200$ to sit in an airport for two hours (the transit visa explicitly states ‘Not Allowed to Leave Airport’).

Of course, not everyone needs a transit visa; the requirement is only for nationals/ passport holders of ‘specific countries’. This is the list of specified countries requiring a transit visa for Frankfurt: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan,Syria and Turkey.(http://www.germany.info/Vertretung/usa/en/04__Legal/02__Directory__Services/01__Visa/__Transit__Country__List__Visa.html).

Notice, of course, that all of the countries are majority non-white, that most of them (including my own, Sri Lanka) were until recently occupied by European colonial forces, and wield considerably less political and economic power globally than the likes of Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, England et al. When I talk to American citizens about this, most of them are surprised and unaware about the necessity of a transit visa. In fact, most of them are surprised and unaware that not everyone can travel the world with little to no hindrance. Nearly all of my friends in Dubai, who are of color and middle-class, can relate stories of frustration, anger, downright discrimination and degradation at the hands of European consulates and visa officers. My cousin was recently denied a student visa to attend college in the US for no identifiable reason than that the visa officer felt like it.

When I was applying for a student visa for the US, we were told to arrive at the embassy by 6 AM. When I got there with my parents at 6.30 AM, there were close to 15 people already in line. We were warned that, the later in the day it was, the higher our chances of being denied a visa due to the fact that visa officers get tired and frustrated as their day goes on.

Tired. Frustrated.

How heartbreaking. You mean they actually may have to work hard for the exorbitant salaries and benefits, (not to mention unrestricted world travel) that being a Euro-American visa officer entails? Tut-tut.

Excuse my sarcasm, but my parents toiled ten hours a day, 6 days a week, with no benefits and no guaranteed retirement for years, fervently hoping to save enough so one day their children can have opportunities they never did. And at the end of the day, it all comes down to whether a visa officer is pissed about not having enough foam in their latte. I remember watching the visa officers sail in with their Starbucks cups to sit behind glass windows, while we applicants sat tense and alert under the guard of somber American flags. When it was my turn, a hundred thoughts were going through my head: smile, look breezy, pretend that this isn’t too important (even though, if denied a visa, I would mostly likely have to delay my attendance by a semester), answer all questions clearly, insist that you have every intention of returning after you graduate, and smile.

This, is powerlessness. This is what underlies the "helpless rage of Third World Citizens". And this is part of what it means to move through the world in a brown body.

People in the US think borders, policing and immigration only relates to Mexico. But the treatment of Mexican immigrants by a white-supremacist state is a microcosm of larger patterns of global inequity. Of course, my personal experiences/ frustrations with world travel are filtered through class privilege. Using the term ‘border patrol’ and referencing the immigration war against Mexico, is in no way an attempt at equalizing different realities. My situation is vastly different and more privileged than that of migrant farm workers robbed of their wages by deportation, or factory workers in Korea who lost jobs (and sometimes lives) because capital can simply up and move, while labor cannot.

In Women’s Studies classes, FGM (female genital mutilation) is always a hot-button issue. People are quick to chastise the ‘barbarity’ of African/ Asian countries, but think nothing of the thousands of ‘genital modification’ surgeries performed involuntarily on intersex babies in US hospitals, or the culturally-fuelled craze for painful procedures like “vagina rejuvenation surgery”. Now, before you jump down my throat about the ‘comparison’, let me state that this isn’t about saying a privileged, American woman paying for a designer vagina is equal to a dangerous, painful procedure performed involuntarily on young girls. What I am saying, is that it’s part of a spectrum, a spectrum of racist patriarchy that values women as bodies first, people second; a spectrum of worldwide misogyny that relegates women’s bodies to cultural symbols and baby incubators.

Similarly, the racist visa policies of Euro-American countries, the unease I, and many other travelers of color, feel in airports, is part of a larger system of policing the mobility of brown bodies; a system interwoven with colonialism, capitalism, and resource monopoly. The privileged bodies, whose mobility is unrestricted worldwide, get to decide where capital goes, where factories are built, where coal is mined. In the wake of advanced, global capitalism, of course not everyone can move through the world freely, because if they did, what’s to stop them (us) from moving to places where wages are livable, land is unpolluted and resources are plentiful? Because at the end of the day, that’s what Western immigration laws are about: protecting access to centuries of amassed (stolen) wealth, and perpetuating a system wherein white bodies can move through the world at will, taking what they need.

Think about the increasing collaborations of local-level law enforcement with federal bodies like the INS, and then the increased military presence in airports all across Europe and America post 9/11, and visa policies directly related to a country's political relationship with Euro-America, and it’s hard to deny that mobility/ travel is anything but innocuous. Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right, and our ability to exercise that right reflects the value placed on our humanity by the societies we live in. For centuries, women in many parts of the world experienced restrictions on their movement. Working class people, people of color, middle-class people, can all relate to the helplessness of seeing jobs come and go, with little power to control where they go and how we can get to them. Mobility is about power. Restrictions on our mobility, whatever form they come in, are an exercise of white, patriarchal, capitalist power.

There is a story in my family that many would prefer to forget. My mother will only divulge reluctant details, and then quickly change the subject. Before I was born, her sister, my aunt, planned to immigrate to the Midway Islands to join her husband, who had found a job there. They were a young, newly married couple, and their son, my cousin S, was little bigger than a toddler.

They left Sri Lanka with the hope of settling in the Midway islands as a family. But something was wrong with their documents: either they were not legitimate or something was missing. Whatever the case, my aunt and her young son were held in a detention facility for almost 5 days. My mother says there were dozens of other women, and children there; mostly brown, mostly young, mostly having travelled nearly 48 hours to see family members.

When my aunt was finally allowed to leave, they sent her and S back to Sri Lanka. Two days after returning home, she contracted a vicious case of chicken pox, from what she believes was the less than sanitary atmosphere of the detention centre.

I have never talked to my aunt about this. It’s something I know my family would rather bury and move on from. But I remember the first time I was travelling to the US, the way my hands nearly trembled when I handed officers my documents, the sense of fearful powerlessness that must bury itself under obsequious replies to the immigration officials. And I thought of her. Young, newly married, newly a mother, never having travelled anywhere outside Sri Lanka. I imagine her trying to reason with the officials, trying to make sure her English is not terribly accented, crying but swallowing her sobs for the sake of her son. I imagine the helplessness, the pure terror, the indignity of it all, and I know I will never breathe easy travelling through American airports.

"What if every time they pulled over one of us
we got to grab one of them?
What if we could bring them to that long beige place
and make them unlock all the ones who didn’t make it through?
keep going open the doors at Guantanimo and the Celebrity Inn
what if we could jump behind that counter
get on the PA and announce
It is hereby declared
that all borders are bullshit
and starting today
we will never stand on this line
sweating terror
ever
again"
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Of Bodies and Borders (Part II)

2010-05-11T15:38:00.000-07:00

The Reason for Flesh

Nights are never quiet in Dubai. Traffic weaves a constant symphony, interspersed with tire-screech and straining brakes, and never fading beyond a metallic hum. My grandmother sleeps next to me, and every so often the breeze from the open window will breathe her scent of Yardley lavender, the silky powder folded in her skin. She has left the window open despite traffic noise. Maybe she’s just used to the open windows. In Sri Lanka, where she has spent most of her life, the nights are silvery with cricket song that hides among wet leaves.

I am wide-awake.

It used to be that the steel lullaby of Dubai roads would slide me into sleep. Two years ago, when I started college in Moorhead, I would wake up into the stillness of nights and see frost creeping over my windows, and the silence would crush down my chest until it hurt to cry.

Four days away from the New Year. 2000 miles away from Sri Lanka and 7000 away from Moorhead. Suspended between realities, I embody displacement in numbers.

And I think of you. I want you between my teeth, my tongue, my thighs.

This morning there were three children on the front-page of Gulf News. All under the age of four. Killed by shelling. I try to forget aching details: little stained sweatshirts with Disney cartoons, wool hat lopsided on a head that’s rounded the way only children’s can be, fist curled like a bud. They looked no different from thousands of other children, all around the world, sleeping a sleep of milky dreams. You would have to look close, to see the spot of blood on one forehead, the smear on another cheek. Their father wore a yellow sweatshirt and khaki pants. He must have been about your age. Beside him the bodies of his children were arranged on a cloth, like slain piglets. When I looked at his face, I burned with shame because I was safe, protected. Alive.

It is day 6 since the Gaza bombing started.

My thoughts run on death. The death in Gaza, exploding within the same air that I breathe in safety. The death in Jaffna, the northern reaches of Sri Lanka where jungle lies thick as knotted veins, and the women who pick up children left alive and walk.

And walk.

This flesh that cleaves to our bones is all we have, all we must love, because everything else - country, home, safety - can be burned, whittled away by bullets. It is our last refuge, and I think of your body and want you suddenly, so that the wanting claws in my lower belly.

I long for the cool quietness of Fargo nights, even for that sense of distance I so hated at first. That American complacence in a world writhing with war. The complacence I had bought into: that everything’s too far away to care about, to touch us. I don’t want to think about the father in his yellow sweatshirt, his scrunched up face. It makes me think of what your face would be, if your daughter lay dead. You call her Angelface, Precious, My little girl. In all the pictures she is full-limbed and laughing like a cherub. Running over lawns in Minnesota summer, she will never know the sounds of falling death. She will never struggle to remember what home smells like, because war will not displace her.

My grandmother shifts in her sleep, farther away from me, and I think of the compactness of bodies. The dull restrains of skin. The way flesh aches for touch and solidity.

Yearning is the absence of flesh. A hollowness, like glass.

The world is burning. The sky in Gaza is rent with fire, its air sharp with flying steel.

There is nowhere for flesh to hide.

Your shoulders are like mountains in the sun; I want to feel them again beneath my palms, sliding and rising. I want to clutch them desperate like hope, anchor myself in the moment of our oneness. There is glass in my breasts, cutting and pointed. I cover them with my palms. Even this is a privilege, their unscarred wholeness, safe from fire and metal. I conjure your hands over mine. In a world unraveling, the ache of flesh is all that is real, all that is prayer.

Feel, breathe, this wholeness. This life.

*****

This piece was inspired by the amazing Suheir Hammad. This is her poem about bodies and borders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrECC1FR410

"Looking for my Body" Of Bodies and Borders (Part I)

2010-05-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from a series of short essays, mostly based on my last visit to my home-country, Sri Lanka, after 5 years away. The title is from a poem by Suheir Hammad.

"But the native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art must realize that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities."
Frantz Fanon

Fanon’s words haunt me. Am I the native people of Sri Lanka? Young, female, foreign-educated, far more fluent in English than Sinhalese, loving and yet almost afraid of understanding the reality of my country?

Is it my country to claim?

The aboriginal Vaddas, the oldest known inhabitants of Sri Lanka, are almost extinct. No one can tell me what happened to them, only that by the time the Dutch and British came they were already greatly diminished in number. Historians speculate that when King Vijaya founded the Sinhalese empire, Veddas were the casualty. Does everything of our known world have its origins in blood and death?

In the long aftermath of colonization, I struggle with unbelonging. You never really stop having, loving, longing for, being drawn to your country – you never stop carrying it inside you. The evil of colonization is that you must carry that with you also - a sense of violation. What the colonized know is violence of the body and soul, soil and blood – and the weight of recognizing how that violation resides in you, shapes you, pins you to a mat from which you must wrest the truth of who you are, unfettered by lies and murder.

A civil war raged in Sri Lanka for decades. A war, I was told, fought in my name. For me and mine. Against them – those bloody Tamils, that Demala jarawa, those filthy whores and toilet-workers, poisoning our pure, beautiful nation.

Us, the Sinhala people, the 'true' spirit of Sri Lanka.

But I wonder – does anyone know, really, who we are?

What were we before we came from over the sea? What were we before the British, the Dutch, the Portuguese? Before they cut the hills and fields into shapes reading not yours, reading empire, colony, plantation, reading profit. Before they said to us plant tea, speak English, teach Shakespeare in your schools, we are what you must be to be human, to be worth anything.

Would we have foreseen this war? Or that night of horror when we pulled each other out of homes and battered and raped and burnt our own screaming flesh?

And I think of her.

I had almost forgotten. Her face came to me like the fragment of a dream. She had a body once. We don’t know where it is. We have no inkling of its plains and trajectories, its sun-darkened surfaces or soft, shady contours. We don’t know how it moved, if it liked to curl up when sleeping – all the things we know about the bodies we love.

But for a few months her face was everywhere: on bus-stations, on TV, on the walls around my school.

Her body was gone, eaten in the grenade explosion along with Presidential Candidate Dissananyake and 20 or so of his close friends. Long before the American military machine raised the specter of ‘suicide bomber’ to police more brown bodies, she sacrificed hers for a desperate dream of something, anything but what her reality was.

They found her head in one piece. Two weeks after the assassination, government issued posters appeared everywhere. It was a picture of her severed head, the only frontal image of her face they had. She had no passport or record; no one could even guess at a name.

If This Woman Looks Familiar, Please Call This Number

Her hair was a charred tangle, the neck stump black with burnt blood. Medusa after Perseus was done. Who did know her? Whose daughter was she? Whose sister or niece, whose lover?

I know her eyes were closed in that poster. They were scummy grey, the lids half clamped down. But sometimes when I try to remember her face, those eyes are wide open. Round and white with black pupils that point outward like gun barrels.

If I am to write the realities of my country, then I must concede that these realities are mine particularly. That there are some from which I must draw my fingertips back after the briefest of touches, before the skin singes too deep.

What was in her mind, walking towards him with a garland upheld and death strapped beneath her? Did the device grow warm from the mound of her belly? Did she hesitate, even once? When he bent to the garland, those last moments before death, did she smell the oil in his hair and think of someone else, some stolen night away from the training camps, hot scents of jungle and the sweat of tangled thighs?

I try to give her dreams and desires, to replace the ones we never cared to learn, the ones eaten up in the flames with her brown, brown skin.

Maybe someone remembers her young, unburned, laughing in August rain.

If the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities then the truths we each profess to know are bounded by our flesh, our skin, our living hair, our voices heard and unheard. For each body that is swept away, voided as unworthy, those of us remaining must embody them through our words, our actions, our vision of a different world.

I belong. I unbelong. I am soul. I am body.

I will not use the self-containment of flesh to draw borders. I will turn instead to the hunger of feeling skin, and drink the world’s voices through my palms.

When Feminism Just Isn't Enough...

2010-05-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

Today, I identify as a Womanist.

They tell me it’s not a real word. Why won’t you just say ‘feminist’? As I type this, a predictable red line appears under ‘Womanist’, but leaves ‘feminist’ unmarked. ‘Feminist’ is real.
‘Womanist’ is weird, ridiculous, separatist. It’s not a word!

Even in communities of women fighting injustice, some of us get to be more real than others. Some of us are the norm, are part of the lexicon.

Womanism says, we must all be part of the language, or else the battle is meaningless.

I’m a separatist they say. Stop fracturing the ranks! Get back in line!

I will not march under their banners. I have my own.

I will not ask others to repaint their flags. I stand beside them in solidarity. We hold each other up when our shoulders are sore, we join our voices together when individual breath is ragged. But we will not speak for each other.

We speak with each other.

Case in point: they would rally thousands to protest an anti-choice superbowl commercial, but when anti-choice groups in Georgia target women and communities of color, deliberately aiming to roll back decades of community action for reproductive justice, they are silent.

They offer our Third World sisters solutions. They do not listen to their stories, their histories, their resistance.

Sexism first, racism later. Marriage rights first, racist transphobia later. Healthcare coverage first, racist classism later.

My brother is gay in a country where homosexuality is punishable by law. As I read Foucaldian theories of oppression, he could be accosted by the police for being simply who he is. I attend conferences on social justice, and stay in hotels where poor women, often brown, clean up after me. Womanism says, here is the true test of accountability.

His battle is her battle is my battle is our battle. There is no choosing and assigning importance. The choice was made in our birth, written and coded into women’s bodies, that are also brown bodies, that are also queer bodies. That are our bodies.
When our material lives, our very flesh, embodies the reality that there is no waiting for categorically awarded justice, how can we stay silent while they decide which of our identities is more important?

Downtown Fargo during Pride Week is beautiful, rainbow flags radiant against the summer air. The capitol building in Madison is a brilliant white, aching like possibility, like desperate hope.

Luminous glimpses of a different future. But still not enough.

I am Womanist. I want nothing to do with liberation riding on the backs of those without cis-gender privilege, those without livable wages, those without a college degree.

Womanism says, the true meaning of sisterhood is always, always, accountability to your sisters and brothers. It is confronting your privilege and always listening to those that are marginalized, and somehow knowing that the hurt you feel is not the end, but a path to transcending sympathy and coming to real empathy.

Womanism belongs to everyone. Women, children, the earth, men. Yes, men. Because while womanism knows the anguish of masculine colonization and abuse, it will not abandon the fight of our black and brown brothers against racist masculinities designed for building a prison industrial complex out of their lives.

Earlier this year I was privileged to hear Winona LaDuke speak. She spoke of rebuilding communities by restoring love for the earth. She said that her people, the Anishinaabe, have different names for the moon every month: June is Blossom Moon, August is Rice Moon, and March is Snow Crust Moon.

Why was this remarkable? Because none of the moons are named after Roman emperors or patriarchal gods.

She said to us: imagine, a worldview that’s not based in empire.

And I think about how I love the Dakotas. The way the land breaks upon you, a sudden turn and a sweep of prairie revealed; untouched snow blue under the rising moon, bordered with distant trees soft and shadowy like someone penciled them in.

But recently, up on a small plane over farmland in North Dakota, I saw the land differently.

I saw where the river curves around trees, the cities huddled close around its waters, where the roads are, and where they aren’t.

Womanism is both being in that plane, realizing the inevitability of connections, the simultaneity of connections, but also being on the ground, upon the land, in solidarity with the people you share it with.

In the difficult, sometimes contradictory place between theory and lived knowledge, between self-healing and reaching out your hands, between keeping hope alive and always remembering those who live that much closer to the ugliness of oppression, Womanism says we must keep going, we must keep faith, even when we are unsure where our strength and faith will come from.

Leann Howe writes:

“Save her. she is the Jewish women shot to death by the Germans at Babi Yar

Save her. She is the Palestinian women shot to death by the Jews at Deir Yassin

Save her. She is the Vietnamese women shot to death by the Americans at My Lai

Save her. She is the Mayan women shot to death by the Mexicans in Chiapas.

Save her. She is the Black women shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan.

Save her. She is The People, our grandmothers, our mothers, our sisters, our ancestors, ourselves.

Save us.”

Today, I identify as a Womanist. I have my own banner. I paint my own flag.

To be accountable, to be responsible, to truly envision social justice, there is nothing else I can be.

Today, I am a Womanist.