thank you, come again
[ Asian Women Blog Carnival #1]
sita pays her dues
"Is that your new doggie? She's so adorable!" I tell my co-worker Cathy, and she smiles and declares, "she's a golden doodle."
I peer at the photograph, making out ears and nose and paws amid the bundle of honey-coloured puppy cradled in her owner's arms, and Cathy ventures, "We're thinking of naming her Karma."
---
I know about three separate women who call themselves "Kali". They are all white. I don't know any Indian women named Kali, because it is a name that brings very heavy associations with it that most parents don't want to burden their little girls with. I've come across even more white women calling themselves Kali when it comes to paganism and the occult, all sorts of articles advising pantheists to aspect Kali in order to get rid of negative influences in their lives or explaining why she's not so scary despite her tongue and her wild eyes and her girdle of skulls. No, they assure the reader, she's basically the Morrigan with a dot on her forehead, just a Hindu version of the Crone.
---
Elizabeth Gilbert heads to India for the "pray" segment of her best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love; she goes to an ashram and has a lot of wacky adventures trying to concentrate on the tedious prayers, talking to a fellow American for the *real* scoop on enlightenment, and fetishizing a photograph of an Indian woman whom she never meets but whom she insists is her "guru".
Nina Paley reads the Ramayan and doesn't like it. She thinks that Prince Rama's devoted consort Sita is "too submissive". Then her husband dumps her, and suddenly Sita's story becomes something else: a discourse upon which Paley can inscribe her own feelings and perceptions, a beautiful exotic therapy session called Sita Sings the Blues that will win her awards and acclaim.
---
I am tired of this. I am tired of white women using my words, my concepts, my goddesses and my stories and my clothing and my food for their own fulfillment, ignorant of the context of oppression and imperialism, and then telling me I should be happy about it. I'm tired of the Pussycat Dolls wearing bindis and nose-rings, tired of air fresheners helping people to "plug into their karma", tired of the disassociation of yoga from Hinduism among its fans and sneers about its chants and poses among its detractors.
Let me tell you my truth.
---
My mother is considered illegitimate because Trinidad, the country of her birth, was under British rule at the time and did not recognize her parents' Hindu wedding as legal.
My parents don't speak Hindi. They were ashamed of their own parents speaking it. They never taught the language to my sister and me; perhaps they couldn't, even if they wanted to.
All of the Important Books I read as a girl were about white people. If they did mention Hinduism, Hindus, or India, it was in language so derisive and dismissive that I would spend ages trying to formulate explanations and rebuttals, anything to drown out the shame.
My own best friend of twenty years, an Indo-Canadian Ismaili, told me just a fortnight ago that because I'm from the West Indies, she not only thinks of herself as more Indian, she thinks of me as more black than Indian.
---
You don't know how hard I've had to work to reach a place of comfort with being Indian but not from India, with being Hindu as distilled through the Middle Passage and decades in the canefields. You don't know how many times I've had to deny in front of white people the deities I adore, the food my mother cooks, the festivals my family celebrates; how many times I've had to work to convince brown people that my ways of doing these same things are just as Indian, just as Hindu as theirs.
My access to my own heritage has been denied me so long. Why do I have to be happy to see other people not only trivialize my culture, but also use it for profit? Why is it that they can talk about chakras and ayurvedic fragrances and curries and Kali Ma and saris and mendhi with the assurance that nobody will look down on them for it, but I can't even bring myself to watch Bollywood films? Why did I have to hide all of my Indianness so much and so well that even other brown people refuse to acknowledge it?
---
Here is what I know:
Kali is not a white woman. Kali is not an un-Irish crone. Kali Ma is dark and fierce and terrifying, and you cannot call upon her lightly -- much less bear her name -- unless you understand what it is like to look into her incomprehensible face and feel hollowed out, humbled and exhilarated and reverent all at once because she will do what you cannot.
Going to a poor, brown, developing country to have your Grand Spiritual Awakening is just another form of tourism. Come see our noble savages; they can show you how their simple spiritualism is done in the wild, so surely once you achieve it with all your privilege and education you will be a higher form of enlightened being, ready to go back and feel superior to your benighted Western friends. Live in their huts and sleep on their floors, only don't drink their water, because the Ganges is, well, you know.
Sita has been written and rewritten by Indian storytellers for centuries. She tells her husband he's lost his mind; she merrily refuses to be banished; she fires the bow that kills Ravana. Women have been told to be like Sita generation after generation, and so they have interpreted the sort of Sita they want to be. All this before she was dismissed as yet another victim of arranged marriage and bride-burning and sati; all this before she was generously recognized as possibly having some worth once a white woman could use her story to tell her own pain.
My parents got married in a civil ceremony in Toronto before my sister and I were born, and when we moved to Trinidad they had a Hindu wedding at our house. My mother wore a pink sari and my father wore a dhoti, and they went around and around the fire.
I am trying to decide whether to study French or Hindi next semester, and right now Hindi has a bit of an edge.
My way of being Indian, my way of being Hindu, are every bit as legitimate and true and real even if I grew up in the not-quite-East and not-quite-North, in the crucible of the West Indies and its molten swirl of black cadence and brown glissando.
---
"We decided naming her 'Karma' might be offensive," Cathy tells me the next morning, sounding much more sure about it. "Oh?" I say. She nods and says, "we named her Charlie."
"Charlie," I repeat. "It's a nice name for a dog."
Cathy smiles at me, and it's easy to smile back.
thanks to ciderpress for the space to talk.
sita pays her dues
"Is that your new doggie? She's so adorable!" I tell my co-worker Cathy, and she smiles and declares, "she's a golden doodle."
I peer at the photograph, making out ears and nose and paws amid the bundle of honey-coloured puppy cradled in her owner's arms, and Cathy ventures, "We're thinking of naming her Karma."
---
I know about three separate women who call themselves "Kali". They are all white. I don't know any Indian women named Kali, because it is a name that brings very heavy associations with it that most parents don't want to burden their little girls with. I've come across even more white women calling themselves Kali when it comes to paganism and the occult, all sorts of articles advising pantheists to aspect Kali in order to get rid of negative influences in their lives or explaining why she's not so scary despite her tongue and her wild eyes and her girdle of skulls. No, they assure the reader, she's basically the Morrigan with a dot on her forehead, just a Hindu version of the Crone.
---
Elizabeth Gilbert heads to India for the "pray" segment of her best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love; she goes to an ashram and has a lot of wacky adventures trying to concentrate on the tedious prayers, talking to a fellow American for the *real* scoop on enlightenment, and fetishizing a photograph of an Indian woman whom she never meets but whom she insists is her "guru".
Nina Paley reads the Ramayan and doesn't like it. She thinks that Prince Rama's devoted consort Sita is "too submissive". Then her husband dumps her, and suddenly Sita's story becomes something else: a discourse upon which Paley can inscribe her own feelings and perceptions, a beautiful exotic therapy session called Sita Sings the Blues that will win her awards and acclaim.
---
I am tired of this. I am tired of white women using my words, my concepts, my goddesses and my stories and my clothing and my food for their own fulfillment, ignorant of the context of oppression and imperialism, and then telling me I should be happy about it. I'm tired of the Pussycat Dolls wearing bindis and nose-rings, tired of air fresheners helping people to "plug into their karma", tired of the disassociation of yoga from Hinduism among its fans and sneers about its chants and poses among its detractors.
Let me tell you my truth.
---
My mother is considered illegitimate because Trinidad, the country of her birth, was under British rule at the time and did not recognize her parents' Hindu wedding as legal.
My parents don't speak Hindi. They were ashamed of their own parents speaking it. They never taught the language to my sister and me; perhaps they couldn't, even if they wanted to.
All of the Important Books I read as a girl were about white people. If they did mention Hinduism, Hindus, or India, it was in language so derisive and dismissive that I would spend ages trying to formulate explanations and rebuttals, anything to drown out the shame.
My own best friend of twenty years, an Indo-Canadian Ismaili, told me just a fortnight ago that because I'm from the West Indies, she not only thinks of herself as more Indian, she thinks of me as more black than Indian.
---
You don't know how hard I've had to work to reach a place of comfort with being Indian but not from India, with being Hindu as distilled through the Middle Passage and decades in the canefields. You don't know how many times I've had to deny in front of white people the deities I adore, the food my mother cooks, the festivals my family celebrates; how many times I've had to work to convince brown people that my ways of doing these same things are just as Indian, just as Hindu as theirs.
My access to my own heritage has been denied me so long. Why do I have to be happy to see other people not only trivialize my culture, but also use it for profit? Why is it that they can talk about chakras and ayurvedic fragrances and curries and Kali Ma and saris and mendhi with the assurance that nobody will look down on them for it, but I can't even bring myself to watch Bollywood films? Why did I have to hide all of my Indianness so much and so well that even other brown people refuse to acknowledge it?
---
Here is what I know:
Kali is not a white woman. Kali is not an un-Irish crone. Kali Ma is dark and fierce and terrifying, and you cannot call upon her lightly -- much less bear her name -- unless you understand what it is like to look into her incomprehensible face and feel hollowed out, humbled and exhilarated and reverent all at once because she will do what you cannot.
Going to a poor, brown, developing country to have your Grand Spiritual Awakening is just another form of tourism. Come see our noble savages; they can show you how their simple spiritualism is done in the wild, so surely once you achieve it with all your privilege and education you will be a higher form of enlightened being, ready to go back and feel superior to your benighted Western friends. Live in their huts and sleep on their floors, only don't drink their water, because the Ganges is, well, you know.
Sita has been written and rewritten by Indian storytellers for centuries. She tells her husband he's lost his mind; she merrily refuses to be banished; she fires the bow that kills Ravana. Women have been told to be like Sita generation after generation, and so they have interpreted the sort of Sita they want to be. All this before she was dismissed as yet another victim of arranged marriage and bride-burning and sati; all this before she was generously recognized as possibly having some worth once a white woman could use her story to tell her own pain.
My parents got married in a civil ceremony in Toronto before my sister and I were born, and when we moved to Trinidad they had a Hindu wedding at our house. My mother wore a pink sari and my father wore a dhoti, and they went around and around the fire.
I am trying to decide whether to study French or Hindi next semester, and right now Hindi has a bit of an edge.
My way of being Indian, my way of being Hindu, are every bit as legitimate and true and real even if I grew up in the not-quite-East and not-quite-North, in the crucible of the West Indies and its molten swirl of black cadence and brown glissando.
---
"We decided naming her 'Karma' might be offensive," Cathy tells me the next morning, sounding much more sure about it. "Oh?" I say. She nods and says, "we named her Charlie."
"Charlie," I repeat. "It's a nice name for a dog."
Cathy smiles at me, and it's easy to smile back.
thanks to ciderpress for the space to talk.