Archives for November, 2006

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 »