How do you write about identity when you kind of think the entire concept is ... well ... icky ...
Google India ran an ad that is all the rage in both India and Pakistan. Go turn on the English captions and watch it if you feel like a good cry. But you won't cry as much as I did because your father is not my father.
My father resembles Yusuf physically, and sits around telling long stories like Baldev. He can savor a memory of a particular garden, or cake or sweet like it was a treasure. He can vividly evoke sneaking into his father's room to steal cigarettes. My father was born in a small town not far from Karachi, but grew up in the mountains of West Bengal, in a sleepy village where all the Hindus and all the Muslims got together and said there is carnage all over this country, but it is not coming here. Not in our town. No. And Darjeeling, India saw not one speck of violence. Karachi, Pakistan was another story.
My father is an old Sindhi man, like both the Hindu and the Muslim old Sindhi men in this advertisement.
The last frame of this video, with the two old men raising their arms with joy in the rain, is everything I've ever tried to do as an artist. No really, I do this over and over again. Because I don't believe in identity. Identity is a corrupt tool that creepy politicians employ to make boys like Baldev and Yusuf grow up apart, and the only thing stronger than identity is love.
This does not endear me to some people lately.
See, the fashion these days is to stroke our identities, to hug our grievances like they are our pet hedgehogs, to declare that Unity is for White Women, to talk endlessly about microaggressions and the invisible knapsack of privilege and it all makes me bloody miserable.
All these things are important, and yes there are inequities and injustices oh everywhere, everywhere, but there is a line where loving our injustices turns into the impulse to massacre, and what I want ... perhaps what I long for on a genetic level ... is Mandela's Ubuntu. Truth but also Reconciliation. Tear down the Berlin Wall and party on the other side. Desegregate the public schools in the South and experience the courage and terror so rarely appreciated of 12 year olds crossing to the other side of the cafeteria. Make music together. Remember stealing candy together. Two old Sindhi men raising their hands in joy in the rain.
At some point we have to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
I went to a Pakistani restaurant in Prague once, and the guy behind the counter looked at me and said, "where are you from?" and my friend Alan said, "She's American." and I said "No, its okay, I'm Sindhi Hindu, parents from India, brought up in the US," and all my white friends got freaked but the man said, "Oh, so you like the food!" and I said, "Yes, its like from home," and he said of course, of course, here have a free cup of tea by the way your money is no good here. He was so pleased I came to his restaurant, I was so please he was pleased. In time he would invite me to visit his home in Pakistan, and I said maybe I will come, but I never did.
I know that somewhere, some Indians and some Pakistanis really wants us to be at war, but I have literally never met one of those people. Most ordinary people would just rather have tea and say to hell with it.
And you know when you've been stalked by skinheads you tend not to sweat the small stuff so much. Sometimes microagressions are really just people being socially awkward, and I can't spend my life angsting about peoples intentions all day.
In the meanwhile, Partition was the result of centuries of the British policy of Divide and Conquer. Curiously enough, so was slavery in the American South. And the clusterfuck that is Israel and Palestine. The one thing we can't give them credit for is Yugoslavia. But even among the Balkans I know are Serbs and Croats who fell in love and had to leave the country. They told me that nobody knew who was what in Sarajevo before the war ... which is exactly what Dad says about Hindus and Muslims before Partition.
I mean think: Do you know who among your friends are Catholic or Protestant? Can you even really remember who the Jews in your neighborhood are? Okay, now you are all at war ... go! Can you figure it out?
No?
This I do know: I've read enough history to know that tolerance is never perfect, but it is always delicate. Akbar the Great is followed by the hardliners like Arangzeb. Rudolfine Prague is destroyed by the Thirty Years War. Southern France is wiped out by the Albigensian Crusade. And hey, who doesn't really expect the Spanish Inquisition. Its like there are pockets of peace and freedom and openness and they are NEVER perfect and they are always less than completely just, but they are free. They coincide with economic, artistic and intellectual flowering ... and then somebody ALWAYS decides that all this freedom just is too much, and then Many Things Ensue.
And we're overdue.
The great community organizer Gail Cincotta once said "We have met the enemy and it isn't us." I wish I could get everyone I know to imbibe this idea. We are not the enemy. The point isn't to meditate upon our sins and injuries so long that the folks who have already decided that we don't need all this freedom anymore and come and oh I dunno re-institute Jim Crow era voting laws (I am from North Carolina) while we bitch about whether or not Joss Whedon is really a feminist.
I dunno. I'm tired of identity politics.
I cannot really escape them, of course. I am after all a writer of color too. And I am subject to all the same pressures of all the other writers of color I know. My identity cannot be irrelevant because other people will always make it relevant. But oh, one day ... there will be none of this nonsense. One day we'll see that borders and labels are ugly things that keep us from joy and love and fond memories of stealing sweets. One day we'll all sit in the Monsoon and raise our hands in the rain together.
Click to viewMy father resembles Yusuf physically, and sits around telling long stories like Baldev. He can savor a memory of a particular garden, or cake or sweet like it was a treasure. He can vividly evoke sneaking into his father's room to steal cigarettes. My father was born in a small town not far from Karachi, but grew up in the mountains of West Bengal, in a sleepy village where all the Hindus and all the Muslims got together and said there is carnage all over this country, but it is not coming here. Not in our town. No. And Darjeeling, India saw not one speck of violence. Karachi, Pakistan was another story.
My father is an old Sindhi man, like both the Hindu and the Muslim old Sindhi men in this advertisement.
The last frame of this video, with the two old men raising their arms with joy in the rain, is everything I've ever tried to do as an artist. No really, I do this over and over again. Because I don't believe in identity. Identity is a corrupt tool that creepy politicians employ to make boys like Baldev and Yusuf grow up apart, and the only thing stronger than identity is love.
This does not endear me to some people lately.
See, the fashion these days is to stroke our identities, to hug our grievances like they are our pet hedgehogs, to declare that Unity is for White Women, to talk endlessly about microaggressions and the invisible knapsack of privilege and it all makes me bloody miserable.
All these things are important, and yes there are inequities and injustices oh everywhere, everywhere, but there is a line where loving our injustices turns into the impulse to massacre, and what I want ... perhaps what I long for on a genetic level ... is Mandela's Ubuntu. Truth but also Reconciliation. Tear down the Berlin Wall and party on the other side. Desegregate the public schools in the South and experience the courage and terror so rarely appreciated of 12 year olds crossing to the other side of the cafeteria. Make music together. Remember stealing candy together. Two old Sindhi men raising their hands in joy in the rain.
At some point we have to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
I went to a Pakistani restaurant in Prague once, and the guy behind the counter looked at me and said, "where are you from?" and my friend Alan said, "She's American." and I said "No, its okay, I'm Sindhi Hindu, parents from India, brought up in the US," and all my white friends got freaked but the man said, "Oh, so you like the food!" and I said, "Yes, its like from home," and he said of course, of course, here have a free cup of tea by the way your money is no good here. He was so pleased I came to his restaurant, I was so please he was pleased. In time he would invite me to visit his home in Pakistan, and I said maybe I will come, but I never did.
I know that somewhere, some Indians and some Pakistanis really wants us to be at war, but I have literally never met one of those people. Most ordinary people would just rather have tea and say to hell with it.
And you know when you've been stalked by skinheads you tend not to sweat the small stuff so much. Sometimes microagressions are really just people being socially awkward, and I can't spend my life angsting about peoples intentions all day.
In the meanwhile, Partition was the result of centuries of the British policy of Divide and Conquer. Curiously enough, so was slavery in the American South. And the clusterfuck that is Israel and Palestine. The one thing we can't give them credit for is Yugoslavia. But even among the Balkans I know are Serbs and Croats who fell in love and had to leave the country. They told me that nobody knew who was what in Sarajevo before the war ... which is exactly what Dad says about Hindus and Muslims before Partition.
I mean think: Do you know who among your friends are Catholic or Protestant? Can you even really remember who the Jews in your neighborhood are? Okay, now you are all at war ... go! Can you figure it out?
No?
This I do know: I've read enough history to know that tolerance is never perfect, but it is always delicate. Akbar the Great is followed by the hardliners like Arangzeb. Rudolfine Prague is destroyed by the Thirty Years War. Southern France is wiped out by the Albigensian Crusade. And hey, who doesn't really expect the Spanish Inquisition. Its like there are pockets of peace and freedom and openness and they are NEVER perfect and they are always less than completely just, but they are free. They coincide with economic, artistic and intellectual flowering ... and then somebody ALWAYS decides that all this freedom just is too much, and then Many Things Ensue.
And we're overdue.
The great community organizer Gail Cincotta once said "We have met the enemy and it isn't us." I wish I could get everyone I know to imbibe this idea. We are not the enemy. The point isn't to meditate upon our sins and injuries so long that the folks who have already decided that we don't need all this freedom anymore and come and oh I dunno re-institute Jim Crow era voting laws (I am from North Carolina) while we bitch about whether or not Joss Whedon is really a feminist.
I dunno. I'm tired of identity politics.
I cannot really escape them, of course. I am after all a writer of color too. And I am subject to all the same pressures of all the other writers of color I know. My identity cannot be irrelevant because other people will always make it relevant. But oh, one day ... there will be none of this nonsense. One day we'll see that borders and labels are ugly things that keep us from joy and love and fond memories of stealing sweets. One day we'll all sit in the Monsoon and raise our hands in the rain together.