It’s really difficult for me to write these days. I’ve just come back from a 3 day wedding - a wedding filled with firsts: the first Indian wedding (this was a North Indian wedding), the first family wedding I’ve attended (my cousin), and the first event where I have had to be around family, fully decked out in North Indian clothes and seen as an adult.

A lot of life is about performance, I’ve come to realize. It’s all about those little details that keep family from getting caught in arguments - what I refer to as “family politics” - a fake laugh, keeping your mouth shut when your elders tell you that you’ve gained weight, learning not to correct “art college” from “liberal arts college” when they attempt to belittle your choice in humanities. At a certain point, whether I intend to or not, I find my eyes move slightly down, my walk becomes a little slower and my voice is heard considerably less when I’m at family events (hereby referred to as “functions”). These things all come down to the gender roles that have been assigned to me through a variety of things - little comments that were made to me as a child by extended family, the media. And the particularities of these gender roles are dictated by my family’s culture.

I have a long history with battling culture. I was sitting at the henna-ceremony, looking around at the one of 40 women that had attended the event who was around my age. The first was 23. And married. Her hair was perfectly straight and her outfit was perfectly tailored and her husband was an attractive and wealthy South Asian man. She looked like an Indian Barbie doll. She looked domesticated and manicured and feminine - and to be honest, it doesn’t matter whether she is reading Sister Outsider under her covers with a flashlight while her husband is asleep or not. What matters is her performance - her ability to fit a model that is dictated by a culture that I cannot relate to.

My claim is this: I don’t know if I ever will feel connected to my identity as an Indian-American because of culture. Culture is not the thing that dictates my struggle for social justice. The reality is, the aspects of “Indianness” that make me feel like an Indian-American is the solidarity I share with other Indian-Americans regarding racism, sexism and homophobia in the community. It is often shared experience my family has with other South Asian families that immigrate to the United States. It is the brown color of my skin that I have grown to love that helps me to identify as Indian-American. It is my parents. My grandparents. My aunt.

There is more to say, but it will have to wait.

Cross-posted at Feministe