Sister Song

A woman who dreams of moving into the hollows of the word, must have
at least two sisters. One to teach her how to swim through the petals
and leaves. One to hold her hand while she moves through the imprints
of the nights before.

Her eyes can rip me apart
any time any day.
As I roam around the abandoned port city
looking for mothers, fathers, brothers and friends,
I want to send a letter to her overripe skin:
Thank God one does not have to
Seek out the sisters anymore these days.

Absences, as you got
to know
are really that fucking
heavy. Like women poets
craving lonely garrets
for themselves alone.

The art of lipsticking
words
you or I didn't
have time to
learn yet.

Take me to the dancing volcanoes, my dear old friend.

I know you will
never
sing of solid colors
while
sugary forms crush upon
the shores.
I know I cannot
revel
in the chants or
libations anytime
anymore.
I wish we could
cry a river in
here.
I wish it wasn't
that
hard to unwrap the
words
from their sequinned sheens.

I wish I knew how to better mimic the chameleon, my love.

I wish I knew better how to do the spider-walk.

I wish I knew better how to sell my glittery wares.

What are we waiting for...

Let's ,then, begin to learn to move through the shadows of the earth instead?

South Asian Studies and Being South Asian

I keep telling my friends that I really need to do a second PhD, and that too in South Asian Studies. It's a field which desperately needs the interventions of people like me. They all laugh at me...yeah, right, after yapping on and on for years on the problems and dangers of being a native informant...anyway, I have been doing some thinking on the whole Area Studies thing. It's not that I have very definite thoughts about it. But I have some observations, which have emerged primarily out of my experiences of being in classes offered by the Asian Studies program in my university. I have consciously avoided being the South Asian Literature and/or South Asian Cultural Studies expert for some time now. Not that I think it is not important to study South Asia, but the whole native informant thing bothers me to no end. I had tried, a while back, to write some of my concerns in the post here. My own approach to it has been, as someone interested in creating a more sustainable and enjoyable world, we need to get familiar with global history as much as possible. At least our approach to questions of colonialism,imperialism, race, gender and sexuality( or in other words, systems of oppression) needs to be more all-encompassing and move beyond what we perceive as our immediate identities. So while I have avoided being the South Asian expert, I have tried to create as much conversations as possible between South Asian cultural texts and texts from other marginal cultures and communities.

So I am in this class on the methodologies of Gender Studies in the context of South Asian texts and out of 12 graduate students, I am the only South Asian. There are two white men and all others are white women, including the professor(whom I actually like quite a lot). My female classmates are all very "feminine", have long hair and wear lots of subcontinental ornaments and clothes.And here I am in their midst, with my cropped hair, black/brown/olive green cargo pants and cotton shirts. The irony of the situation strikes me as very very funny. But it also leads me to ask certain questions. Why is it that South Asian women are perceived to be super, extra-super, overtly-super feminine? What that perception of overt-femininity has to do with the racial and colonial politics? Of course, what I am saying here has valence only for a small segment of South Asian women. Others, who would not fall into that overtly-feminine category, like the working-class women, the lower caste women, have been successfully erased from historical, political, cultural texts. (Uma Chakravarti has an interesting essay on this specific problem called "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?" questioning the absence of the figure of the "dasi" or the servant-woman both within colonial texts and male-nationalist texts.) But then, the problem is, there are South Asian women like us who are short-haired, prefer to wear gender-neutral clothes and shun jewelleries and make-up. Where and how do we fit into the dominant perceptions of South Asian femininity? For example, I have been told numerous times, including in immigration check-posts, that I don't look "Hindu." Meaning I don't have long braids and bindis to prove my Indianness, South Asianness. On other occasions, I have been asked by my fellow grad-student colleagues that what percentage of women in India are like me. It's not hard to see the whole trope of "exceptional native" working in here, but I always succeed to shock a lot of my colleagues when I say that India, like all other places in this planet, has a long and complicated history of feminist movement, women's writings and activism. And not all of these are post-colonial. But what is more problematic is the absence of the critical texts written and published in India/South Asia by South Asian scholars from South Asian courses in this country. It is as if the South Asian texts exist as raw materials to be analyzed, criticized and evaluated by First World scholars without joining in the conversation/debate that is already going on within different parts of South Asia.

But there is also something else which intrigues me about the South Asian departments. Something that's also very visible in this class. So few of their students work on modern and/or contemporary South Asia. It's not that I think working on pre-modern South Asian texts or societies is inherently bad. But there is also this general reluctance to acknowledge the existence of a modern South Asia. Very similar to the project of classical Indology. Which relegated India perpetually into the realm of "ancient." And my pea-sized brain tells me this is not just an innocent fascination with the pre-modern past. But indeed, this is a very problematic manisfestation of an evolutionary understanding of the world and not totally unconnected to the racial-colonial politics which attempted to colonize non-Western territories by claiming that the people in there are not that "modern."

So, yeah...basically the field needs my, our intervention...

I am trying to come to terms with the fact that I have been dealing with a looooooooong writer's block. But I haven't been sitting idle all this while. I did read a little bit, visited England on fellowship money for the first time and now back to school, teaching, working, grading...what not! And hopefully I will be blogging again. I am not sure that I will be able to blog as regularly as I would like to, but I am trying to post something at least once every month. All of you out there, who have probably written me off, I guess, by this time, please wish me luck!

Summer Ramblings

We need to preserve our memories. And in order to preserve our memories, we need to create them. And that’s why it is important to write down our narratives, our stories—whatever they are, however trivial they might seem—whatever. I wouldn’t go into the details of what prompted me to make that comment. Some of them, as you might have guessed, dear readers, are extremely personal. But it also makes me think of our classrooms—what can I do as a teacher to contribute to the ongoing work of preserving and creating memories. What can we do?

In this post, written a few weeks ago, I had ranted about my students’ lack of knowledge of US history. Or, more specifically, their lack of knowledge about the history of the US Empire. If we think about it a little more closely, then, the American dominant national memory has conveniently excluded the memories of the American colonial-imperial onslaughts. Why, I can understand. But then, there is another little thing which I had left out of that earlier post. I did have one student who knew all about the US conquest of Philippines. Yes, my friends, only one. But that was not the scariest part. The scariest thing is, that student of mine is also in the military. So, basically, the knowledge which he possesses, is not at all about radical memorialization, serious social justice actions or any such stuff. It is primarily all about herding a new generation of kids to commit the same atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan that was committed in Philippines in 1898 and after. And readers and friends, as I stood before my class on that day, and looked at my students’ young faces, I felt strangely helpless. Never before did I feel the relationship between power and knowledge so acutely. But also during that moment, I wanted to know desperately about this student’s inner life and thoughts—how did he process the information about the American involvements within his military history class? Now that he is reading Hagedorn’s piece in my class, which clearly states that we need to look into the representations of the Asian women in Hollywood films in terms of American imperial intervention in Asia, how is he re-evaluating the knowledge gleaned from his ROTC program? Is he, at all? What are the conflicts he is going through? And I wanted him to write something on that. You know, a kind of reflective personal essay where he will be able to reflect on certain things. I thought, that would have given us a chance to learn something about the contradictory nature of knowledge acquisition. Similarly, it would have given him a chance to hash out certain issues—possibly and hopefully. But no, the spaces of a Composition classroom will not allow that.

And that is why, as a teacher, I often try to ask my students to interpret their own lives for their writing assignments—whenever it is possible. Interpret them in the light of what they are learning in my class—through the lens of gender politics, class politics, imperial-colonial onslaught etc. etc. We need to create our own narratives, we need to tell the stories of our own lives. And sadly enough, but also understandably, there isn’t a whole lot of space to do that within conventional academic prose.

Love-Language

RM, AJ and RR were my close friends during the last two years of high school. Apart from being heavily in what we thought was "revolution," we were into all kinds of poetry, Camus and Kaffka. We bunked classes to hang out in the little park behind our school campus and experimented with cigarettes, writing and expletives. We were working hard towards becoming what I would later term "professional alienationists." I was the honorary boy in the group and tried to look at all things girly with as much disdain as possible. However, RM, AJ and RR were also heavily into love (heterosexual, needless to say) and love poetry--a pre-occupation I failed to understand. But normally I would keep my reservations to myself. I still didn’t know how exactly to put my finger, pen or tongue specifically on the problem or what I thought was problematic about my friends’ thoughts and conversations. I had just also begun to write poems somewhat seriously and after lots of hesitation, showed my friends a feeble attempt at writing what I thought was my first love poem:

You have never seen
The neem tree
In my backyard grow
You have never seen
The words take shape
In me
You have never seen
The anger rose red
Beneath the
Silkscreen blue
Now, then ,
Fuck off, and
Get lost
You damn bloody
Fool.

Ahhhh...hmmmm.... not the greatest piece of writing I have read, I admit. But what seemed very surprising to me was how all three of my friends agreed that this is not a love poem. I asked them, "Then what is?" They could not exactly give me a definition. But they gave me few examples. One of them was Simon-Garfunkel's Kathy's Song. I did not like the song at that time, but could not explain very well why.

Three days ago, suddenly I got back in touch with one of them and he reminded me of that conversation. The next morning he had emailed me a youtube link of Art Garfunkel singing the song:

I hear the drizzle of the rain
Like a memory it falls
Soft and warm continuing
Tapping on my roof and walls

And from the shelter of my mind
Through the window of my eyes
I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets
To England where my heart lies

My mind's distracted and diffused
My thoughts are many miles away
They lie with you when you're alseep
And kiss you when you start your day

And a song I was writing is left undone
I don't know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can't believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme

And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you

And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go

And the weird thing is, I loved the song this time--the urban ambience, the pain of not being able to create which perhaps gets combined with the pain of sounding politically irrelevant--a lot of things to which I can personally relate. Besides, the words have an inherent sensitivity about them, a softness which is hard to miss. But what I cannot relate to in this song is the philosophy of love presented here. Or, rather the language of love it falls back upon. I have long wondered how language so accurately expresses some of our historical-material conditions. And love-language is such a great example of that. For example, when we say, “ I am yours, you are mine,” there is an inherent possessiveness in that language. Which does not make much sense when we begin to think about it rationally. What has love to do with being someone’s possession or property? Yet, not only are we robustly comfortable in using it as one of our most serious expressions of emotion, we don’t even think about it. Similarly, when someone says, “He/she stole my boyfriend/girlfriend,” almost always I have to resist the temptation to say, “Like stealing a candy in a supermarket?”

And let me admit to you, my friends and readers, every time I hear a declaration of love couched in terms of “you are my world” or something akin to that, I cringe. That’s exactly why, I cannot feel the elation my male friends feel towards “Kathy’s Song.” Every time, I hear something like the line , "I stand alone without beliefs/The only truth I know is you," I cringe to myself. What if a woman recites these lines to her male partner in a moment of loved frenzy and that person takes it too literally or seriously? What will happen after that? The way I think about it is that , the male writers and poets can write those lines with such ease precisely because they know it's not true. Love does not restrict the male world, it just adds on to the already existing public world which any individual man might have created for himself. On the other hand, things are slightly different for women. As it is, a woman has to fight tooth-and-nail in order to maintain the sense of autonomy within a heterosexual relationship. To construct a public world for oneself. To construct an emotional-intellectual space for oneself where one can be relatively free of the familial control and constraints. To believe in something other than the limited opportunities of a familial-conjugal private space. In a way, then, for women “The only truth is you” is not an expression of exceptional love, this is what is expected of them—normatively. You are expected to get absorbed into your lover/husband’s world, if not solely in economic terms, in social, intellectual and spiritual ways. The struggle for any sensible, sensitive, independence-loving woman becomes to say just the reverse, .ie, “I love you, but you are by no means my sole truth or my world.” Or more specifically, if I ever have to write down my own feelings about love, I would have to say something like, I believe fiercely in certain things. Let’s see whether you fit into that or not. That is, in its ideological spirit and content, my assertion will express something that is diametrically opposite to the one expressed in Kathy’s Song.

And that’s one of the hardest things to achieve as a writer, as a poet. How do you write a love poem without replicating the language of patriarchy? How do you talk about desire without reinforcing the blind masculinisms of the dominant love language? How do you talk about long-time, semi-permanent romantic love between a man and a woman without falling under the spell of the property relationships embodied in our languages? Honestly, I haven’t been able to figure out. I have never been able to relate to most of the love poems, love songs and love lyrics—especially those written by heterosexual men. And I have avoided the topic of sexual love in my own writings. And now I realize, even before I had realized it explicitly as a teenager, I had begun to feel a certain kind of alienation from what passes as love lingo.

But then, one can’t end it here. Women writers have written about love for so long and sometimes in such different and complex terms. And as I was writing this one, I realized I desperately need to write a post on my women poets. So look out for the next one, friends. I promise, I will be very very punctual.

Second Carnival of Radical Action--Call for Submissions

Firefly is hosting the Second Carnival of Radical Action . Please think of contributing something. The first one was indeed smashing!!!

Barnes and Nobles and Radical Musicians

A very dear friend of mine who lives in India requested some Woody Guthrie cds. I have been trying to locate them in independent music stories in Austin. I know I could have ordered them directly from the Smithsonian site, but he said this to me only a few days ago and I am leaving for Kolkata on June 13. Which means I would not have enough time for shipping and all. But guess what, Barnes and Noble saved me. Three cheers for our corporate lords! They even stock the old-style Commie musicians! Great! What more can we want?

Do I sound bitter? I do, I guess. The thing is, I am not exactly bitter. But everytime something like this happens to me or to anyone close to me, I am surprised and scared at the power of the corporate capitalism to incorporate us all. Incorporate, co-opt and de-radicalize. And I am too feeble to know how to resist all of that.