Archives for 2006

For all its whitespace, this blog is degenerating into a very dark and gloomy, a very academic and near-sighted place. And really, I’m not always dark and gloomy, not always academic. Though definitely always near-sighted.

Which is why I’m taking up the 3 Beautiful Things challenge.
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I spent much of my childhood in various cities in Saudi Arabia, a country which Arjun Appadurai describes as “notoriously closed to immigration” but with large “populations of guestworkers¹.” He calls the result “labour diasporas,” which is a term I find perfectly gets at the issues of isolation and class that characterize the existence of guestworkers in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Arabia I remember is one defined clearly across lines of race and class – and these are lines that intersect more obviously in Saudi Arabia than they do here in Canada. Continue reading this entry »

With age and sickness, my father’s sense of his own mortality has become an overriding concern in my family. It is no longer a vague concept to be considered philosophically, but an inevitability to be prepared for. That makes us fortunate, in the clichéd sense, in that we are on some level prepared for something we’ve seen happen to others. Prepared, anyway, for It to happen to my father, if not ourselves. A bleak fallacy, but it suffices.
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I’m currently reading Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience. I heard about this book around the same time I heard about Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

I started reading it on the subway on the way back from handing in my third and last essay. I read feverishly, the way I’d read Mistry maybe or exhilarating theory, quickly for fear of losing it. And also because I was tired, desperate to throw myself into my winter break.
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So I’ve finished The Essay.

During the planning stages, I’d intended to examine two stories from Her Mothers Ashes 2. I couldn’t see how I could spin 10-12 pages out of one story. And they were such straight-forward stories: Maya Khankhoje’s “How I Became a Mexican Indian” and Anita Rau Badami’s “The Foreigners.”

I ended up just doing the latter.

The page limit was reduced to 8-10 pages, but now I’m pushing 3600 words and I feel that I have given “The Foreigners” substandard treatment. For the most part, my essay is a clinical application of Arjun Apppadurai’s theory of scapes, particularly ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes, to the story. What this means is that I just outlined the different scapes in the story. Given the theoretical focus and the word limit, I couldn’t delve into a literary deconstruction of the novel, though I did manage to slip in moments of emotion, strands of doubt to keep things alive, particularly near the end. For that I owe thanks to Gloria Anzaldúa and her discussion of life on the Borderlands/La Frontera.
What lingers now is a sense not just of discontent, but of – silly isn’t it? – of mourning.
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A few weeks ago I emailed a bunch of people, bloggers some, asking for recommendations on short stories by South Asian/Muslim writers living in the West. I should have specified that I was looking also for short stories featuring South Asians/Muslims in the West. In any case, this lovely bunch of coconuts¹ gathered for me a comprehensive list of books and authors that I’ve only begun to get through. For those of you who don’t know, I want to become a doctor. That is to say, a doctor of philosophy. (I know, eh. Brown kids these days.) And what I want to pontificate on is the fluidity of identity, as constructed and maintained, individually and communally, along lines of “race,” religion, and nationality.

What this has meant, then, is that for the most part I am studying, deconstructing and reconstructing myself. And that, in ways, the essay that I intend to hand in next week on this topic has been a labour as much of pain, as of love. Luckily for me, the first book I opened was a horrible, horrible choice and it cemented what it is that I will not be arguing.
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A journey splits a day into two: the goodbyes and the after.

Yesterday, and it seems like weeks ago, like the month preceding yesterday never happened, I spent my morning at the downtown bus terminal. My mother and brother were leaving, but we’d arrived too early for the bus. I whiled the hours away sleeping, I don’t know what they talked about.
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And then I burst out, during the break in my Victorian Lit class, something about -.

And that’s the thing. Lamely, halfway through, I found myself saying, “I’m thinking about doing grad studies in Victorian Studies. I started thinking this last week, actually.” Because I needed to justify the preceding outburst. But my thoughts were so disorganised, so misplaced and now in the wrong context, that I stumbled and couldn’t find the footpath through them.

“Because I can’t,” I said at one point, “write about contemporary literature without writing about myself. But that doesn’t happen with Victorian lit – I can focus on the text, and just the text, and not bring in the outside world.”

What I’d meant, and said so poorly, was that there is a comfort level to be found in the sheer distance between my realities and, say, that in Bleak House. So, I can dissect Esther’s lack of being, and yes, see the parallels, but those don’t reflect me in any real way.
Or at least, they don’t get under my skin, don’t stick to me, until I am this text and this text me.

There is an emotional burden to what I propose to embark on that I don’t think I can handle. I want to be able to choose (at least) to be apersonal, to be apolitical, to be absolutely cool and calm and not have to worry that in cracks and crannies of my voice lurk insecurities waiting to leak their way into my academic papers.

And it’s a fallacy, I know. If I looked hard enough, I would find myself here too, in the streets of Victorian London, but I’ve chosen not to. It’s a choice of constructions and I don’t fit, in the current incarnation, in Dickens’ world.

I remember, after the initial consternation, I had understood Moushumi’s “academic rebellion [so that] immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge–she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind.”

And a part of me wants to do that. And another refuses the escapism.

There is a much longer post coming about books. Brown books! About brown people! Crazy brown people!
The profusion of exclamation marks should indicate how excited this makes me. I am preparing to load myself with more books than I can read tomorrow. And then getting all flustered and confused and dazed in time for my essay that I decided would be on books! Brown books! Brownness!

So. But I need to keep a list of books I am reading now, even if they aren’t all brown. Or about brown people. Crazy brown people. (!) Continue reading this entry »

I was in my second year and living in Kingston with my family when I grew tired of hearing my sister say she wished she had blond hair and blue eyes and seeing the ways my brothers, each in their own ways, made themselves as inconspicuous as possible.

On a mission, I hunted the used bookstores downtown looking specifically for children’s books whose protagonists were not white. I returned, successful in that I was loaded with an armload of literature, ranging in geography the world over. For the most part, however, it was a failed endeavour, as my siblings resisted my attempts to spoon-feed them, and the books gathered dust travelling with us as we moved, away from Kingston, back to Toronto.

Last week my seven-year-old neighbour left for a three month tri-national vacation. She left with us a library book to return for her and I found it a few a days ago entangled in my bedsheets.

Anyone who reads this book will be perfectly happy.
- Ursula K. LeGuin

“Anyone who reads this book,” proclaims the inside cover, “will be perfectly happy.” This is a testimonial from Ursula K LeGuin; a tall order by any measure. Eyebrows cocked, poised to throw the book away from any moment now, I started to read Younguncle Comes to Town.
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