Warning: Brown Anger Below

For those who have been peaced out from the real world this past week, because of summer, or Country Fair, or heartbreak, or whatever, here's what you missed:

Time Magazine published an opinion/humour piece by Joel Stien about Indian immigration in his hometown of Edison, New Jersey. Full of nostalgia and recycled clichés, there isn’t much in it worth talking about. Except that it unveils in spectacular fashion the rhetoric and logic that still lies beneath the sexy, suit-jacketed face of Post-Racial America. ("Post" in the sense that it exists beyond any awareness of what it is to be “racial”.)

As though it weren’t enough to dislodge yourself from the familiar for the promise of something the world insists is “the good life”. As though it weren’t enough to scrounge together an identity and carry it with you in a suitcase ten thousand miles to a place where you must remake home from fragments, against an entirely unfamiliar backdrop. As though it weren’t enough to have no idea who you are and where you fit and how to BE in the world. As though it weren’t enough to deal with the dissolution of self and dreams. Let's also take on the responsibility of ruining the landscape of American nostalgia.

Sorry, Joel. We totally disturbed your past in pursuit of our futures.

The malls in India really are "that bad".

Alanis Morissette may have thanked us, but we never got a chance to thank YOU, America. Thank you. Thank you for all that you have allowed us. Thank you for your jobs at desks or in cabs or behind counters, slingin’ donuts or ringing up Slurpees. Thank you for trying so hard to decipher our accents when you’re trying to get your laptop fixed, and for putting up with the overwhelming curry smell we bring with us everywhere we go. Thank you for the eight Oscars, for the occasional pop-culture nod, and for the polite literary applause. Thank you for recognizing our skills, and for telling us what we lack. Thank you for advertising yourself to us, and then withholding. Thank you for luring us away from ourselves, and relocating us in a nowhere. Thank you for letting us lose ourselves trying to be good enough for your left-overs.

Please let me know the next time you need to watch soft-core porn or steal and I'll get my shit out of your way. It's the least I can do for someone who has figured out "why India is so damn poor." And do accept my apologies on behalf of my fellow countrymen who have flooded you with violent emails. It seems we can’t even be relied on to play Gandhi anymore. What ever happened to bending over and turning the other cheek? Tch.

[Slightly altered version published in Brown Girl Magazine.]

"It's hard for me because I'm..."

If you have multiple oppressed identities, which takes precedence? Which is the most crucial? Put more simply, if you're brown, foreign, and a girl, which should you complain about in order to get offered the most number of Kleenexes?

Any bets?

Be warned, however, that if you choose anything other than "girl", you will immediately be accosted by a vast army of highly compassionate, educated, and noble women who will explain to you that female oppression is the most devastating and pervasive ill of all. They'll also say that it is far and away the most important to fight, and that you should put aside all other, relatively trivial historical grudges to fight it. This, they will promise, will liberate you.

That's when you call Saba Mahmood and ask her if she'd like a drink.

She, I trust, will remind you that the world is divided along multiple intersecting lines, and that the elimination of one may not get rid of the rest. Then, I hope, she will suggest that you review the details of your subscription to Liberation Magazine. You may be signing up for things you weren't aware of, and paying more for them than you thought.

Because here's the thing: if you really want to emancipate yourself from whatever you feel is trapping you, you must do it on your own terms. What good is it being saved by someone else if you're merely transferred from danger to dependency?

Think about what happened the last time we were offered salvation in exchange for conversion.

Speak deliberately, and carry a big camera.

I have stumbled upon a late-night screening of "Rick Steves' Iran" on OPB. Watching cultural perception be remade is fascinating. Not to mention amusing: A jovial, unabashedly touristy white gentleman in khakis and button down shirts strolling through the alleys of an intricate red-stone village in the Iranian countryside. Up with the times, he points his SLR at himself and young Iranians he chats with; men about being Iranian, women about being women in Iran. He talks tentatively with a young woman about religion and politics and their mixing. The girl disapproves, which he seems to approve.

He seems interested in establishing a separation between Iran's people and its politics. He gets quotes to support that. He represents culture, history, heritage, modernity, Islam, politics, architecture, infrastructure, and other compositional elements of a nation in ostensible balance. He acknowledges the widespread "resentment" of foreign interference and influence. Still, I feel unsettled.

His intentions certainly seem good. During a soliciting/promotional break, he utters the following:

"I just wanted to humanize the place."

"They don't want their kids to become Britney Spears; I tell them I don't either! They're afraid that their kids will be turned into little sex toys and drug dealers and materialists."

"I just believe you have to KNOW people before you bomb them."

And still, I feel unsettled.

Perhaps it's the curious accent westerners get when they travel to exotic lands and attempt to converse in their language with natives who they fear aren't fluent. Or perhaps it is the fact that, no matter how good the intention, an attempt to demystify always turns into a bid to defang. From scary other to cozy ethnicity (Thanks, Assia Djebar).

All of this sudden attention is not surprising, considering America is finally considering holding hands with Iran. It may help to know they have a "modern sensibility and seem well-educated" and that they love America. That they wear designer sunglasses, and travel by subway. That under their chadors, beneath the many, superficial (and therefore irrelevant) layers of political tension, civilizational conflict and cultural differences lies the fabled universal humanity which will inevitably transcend and reconcile everything else. That 'they' aren't really that different from 'us' after all. That they ultimately want the same things.

So there he is, the translator-traveler-envoy of the West, on a reconnaissance mission, dealing in similarities and differences, positing understanding as the flipside of fear. Engaging in what is undoubtably a noble and increasingly necessary endeavour.

And still, I feel unsettled.

Hypersensitivity/Cultural Sieving

Last night, situated in a nexus of internal and external chaos, some part of me figured it would be a good idea to watch American television. This may seem to reveal a masochistic tendency, because, judging by past encounters with the medium, the likelihood of increased intellectual anguish is high. On the other hand, there was the slim possibility of distraction. After some trawling through reality television and overdone re-runs, I spotted dry land.

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only indisputably positive outcomes of living in a house with cable. They haven't yet become a part of my routine, but I suspect regularity is close at hand. Witty, handsome men with a passion for politics and parody? Yes please.

So there I am on the dreaded couch, watching Jon Stewart and the British correspondent chap argue over whether Canada should be under the Queen's jurisdiction or not, when Aasif Mandvi shows up as the Indian correspondent to persuade the Canadian correspondent to, well, 'kick 'em out', essentially. At one point, adding an emphatic punch to his argument, he says something to the effect of: "Even if India had traffic lights they wouldn't function because the streets are so full of cows. And we still managed to get rid of the British."

While it is amusing to watch India get more and more attention as it moves toward greater and greater global relevance, and while I know this was most likely an entirely self-aware joke, instances like these always shake me awake to the inadequacy and incompleteness of knowledge about India, not to mention the incredible reliance on cultural sterotypes. I think it has something to do with the suddenness of India's importance to the west. Too little time to play catch up means old knowledge persists for the sake of convenience. Of course, The Daily Show is not nearly as problematic as so many other 'agents of information'.

Later, Colbert was interviewing a gentleman named Matthew Alexander who has just written "How To Break A Terrorist", a book about the effectiveness of non-violent interrogation techniques. He explained that he believes the best way to get information is to establish a relationship of trust and mutual respect with the detainee. There was a moment, after Colbert decided to be mildly serious, when the sense of revelation in their conversation struck me. "You've just gotta respect 'em," he said. Or something to that effect. There were definitely a lot of 'them's. Pretty soon, the word started pounding in my ears and I had to turn off the television and go to bed.

Maybe it's all the Edward Said I've been reading, but my thought was (and is) this: "Centuries after the West 'discovered' the 'Orient', having attempted war, conquest, indoctrination, subjugation, anthropological curiosity, stereotyping, fetishism, and condescension, it finally occurs to them to try respect as a strategy to 'deal' with this dangerous other. Well Merry fucking Christmas." It's as if the entire rest of the world is some sort of unidentifiable species, and the West (and I use this term loosely) has, for the last millennium (at least), been conducting some sort of elaborate experiment in which various stimuli are posed to the mysterious creature in order to provoke responses, which are then recorded and analyzed to come up with some sort of conclusion about what it is and how it works. The entire 'Orient' has been placed in some sort of academic petri dish; prodded, provoked and problematized, pending identification.

What is it about the unknown that scares us so much that we feel compelled to seek refuge in the distant safety of third person? 'Them'. As opposed to 'Us'. 'The Other' as opposed to 'It'. God forbid we make the mistake of inclusion or, worse, oneness.