Category Archive

I’m working through a book I started months ago and am finally going to restart and finish. It’s bell hooks’ All About Love and it attempts to sever the ties between love and mainstream romance (read whiteness, patriarchy, heteronormativity) and instead calls for an ethics of love. I’m only a few pages in, but I already loving it - although I admit at times I’m a bit surprised at the borderline hallmark card-iness of the writing (coming from hooks it just strikes me as different than what I’m used to reading from her), so we’ll see how it turns out!

I leave you with a line from her introduction:

“Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart”

Uh..yeah.

From her collection of essays, Sister Outsider. Because sometimes, when we are at a loss for words, we should turn to the writing of the people who help us to remember that we are not alone.

“Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism.

It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change…

Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to mobilization of women’s joint power.

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend…

The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our lives, and many white women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.

Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.

Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same…

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying…”

I am very liberal with the term ‘home’. When I am living on campus during the academic year, I refer to my parents’ residency as ‘home’ - but as soon as I return to northern California, my tiny campus becomes ‘home’.

Most of my childhood was actually spent in Texan suburbia. I remember the house fairly well - the way the outside looked. I keep in touch with a couple of people who still live there so I remember random details about the small suburb of the large city I grew up in. But do I feel attached to Texas in any way? Do I consider it home in any way? Nope.

I was born in San Francisco and went to high school in the Bay Area. And although my heart feels very warm when I think about the bay area, I feel very removed from it. I commuted to school so I never had the chance to explore the town my parents now reside in very well - there isn’t much to know and I like the feeling of familiarity but I don’t feel an overwhelming attachment to this place.

I thought this is the way everybody felt. And now I realize more and more that people are very attached to their homes - the locations they consider home. They feel “at home” in certain spaces - it isn’t just a temporary space where they move their things.

But this is how I feel. After I moved out of Texas I have metaphorically lived out of a suitcase. Locations are fluid. They have sentimental value - there are stores and restaurants I miss seeing and I love my parents’ home. And there was a brief time where my parents’ home was home. I feel comfortable here. But it feels like I’m visiting whenever I’m here. Maybe it’s because I don’t have siblings that live here. I didn’t build a life anywhere. I just lived my life in a few select places, in a couple of lovely little houses.

Then I went back to India. Even using the phrase “back to India” should say something about my relationship to the land. I wasn’t born there - I’ve been there 3 times. I was 1 yrs. old, 12 yrs. old and then I went last December. I’m not fluent in Hindi, the language the community where my grandparents live uses, I don’t feel connected to most of South Asian and North Indian culture. I don’t identify as Indian-American because of culture or religion. I am very unread on the history of the country.

But it feels like a home. There is a sense of belonging that I feel in the air, and in the community. I’m fully aware of my outsider status there - I’m not trying to give up my U.S. citizenship privileges and problematics by proclaiming my connection to the so-called motherland (I feel uncomfortable using this term - does anyone have an alternative? Maybe just ‘homeland’). But I do feel connected to that location in a way that felt new.

Salman Rushdie has a collection of articled and essays entitled Imaginary Homelands and he explains this term so wonderfully:

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge — which gives rise to profound uncertainties — that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind…

While I think Rushdie refers more to the immigrant community that looks back at their home, and more specifically people who are exiled from the homeland, I feel very strongly about this statement. Home for me, is just a narrative. An important narrative, yes, but ultimately, just a story, just a series of memories that makes up a blend of overwhelming nostalgia and trauma.

Only recently have I stopped feeling so unsettled about this. I felt so thrilled at being able to “diagnose” my relationship to this sense of home and homeland that most people around me seem to have. And then I just felt scared.

Now I realize that I still have many things to learn and that part of growing is building one’s own home. And it’s fine to have many homes and a nearly-fairytale vision of one’s homeland. We should hold on to these things if it is what makes us feel safe.

Home is about the people. I can’t help feeling like as communities become further linked and connected, and national boundaries become more blurred, home will only grow as an imaginary concept and we will have to start thinking of home as the multiple spaces where our heart may reside.

“My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. You fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.
Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial destortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.” -Audre Lorde, The uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism

“I’m not telling you that women are weak. Women are strong. Women can do everything as well as men. Women can do much more. But a woman has to seek that vein of strength in herself.” -Nair

I hate this feeling of being tired but having postponed writing that now the need to write has outweighed the fact the my bed is beckoning a mere yard away. So, I shall try my best to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and if I don’t make it past a couple of points, well I’ll just continue tomorrow.

> First, the many quotes I’ve been meaning to put down for others to read - I’m reading my last summer book, Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair, which is in a word, stunning. I haven’t begun my paper but now I realize Nair’s book will be the center of my writing. The quotes don’t need any sort of introduction - those who understand will wince and those who don’t…are lucky?

“I’m not who everyone thinks I am”…
“I know that now. But you hide behind such a stiff armour of control that most people must be in awe of you,”…
“…I wasn’t always like this; so stiff and restrained. I had to grow a shell around myself. To protect myself. To deflect hurt and pain. If I hadn’t, I would have gone insane.”

“Sometimes when friends came calling and there would be a little girl whose father beamed proudly at his daughter’s quick answers, Sheela would want to butt in and plead, ‘Don’t do this to her. My father was the same. He thought it funny when I was cheeky. Only now he calls it back chat and it makes him furious. Please, don’t do this to your daughter. She is going to grow up thinking this is the way to be. Instead, teach her to swallow her words, make her mouth nice and pleasant, innocuous things. Kill her spirit and tame her tongue. So that when she grows up, she won’t be like me, wondering what it is I said wrong and what blunder I am going to commit next by opening my mouth”

“…She thought, all these women….are trying to make some sense of their own existence by talking about it to anyone who will listen. I am the same, she thought. I’m trying to define the reality of my life, justify my failures and my own sense of hopelessness by preying on the fabric of their lives, seeking in it a similar thread that in some way will connect their lives with mine, make me feel less guilty for who I am and what I have let myself become.”

The whole book could be a quote, really. But ya know.

>I wanted so much to talk about how lovely yesterday was, but maybe I will save that for another day.

> For the first time in so long I actually miss the feeling of being interested in someone. Of classic teen-movie romance. Something I should have experienced at the generalized age of 14? 15? In reading Ladies Coupe, I wonder if it’s even possible for me to feel that kind of butterfly/first date/getting to know you love. That feeling of fascination and excitement - the last time I felt that way was…when I met P. Almost two years ago now. Before and after that…there was just… Struggle.
It makes me angry that the most female-sensitive/forward thinking/cream of the crop males are still intimidated by women in power, women who are smarter and louder and more opinionated than the normalized idealized woman. Why are the few who can handle it praised so highly for being exceptions?

> I need a new name for this blog because I realized that my fatalistic title has done just that - provided an easy out clause for my writing, so that I never feel obligated to process in text once college starts up again. But in wanting to make the effort, I have decided the first and easiest method of commitment is to change the title from seasonal to defining.
Of course the question that arises is, what to name this blog of genre-less deconstruction? Will I even need it when the year begins? It became so useful in providing a means of communicating with people and continue my habits as an antisocial, hibernating introvert. Maybe someone can throw out a suggestion.

11:49! It was an early morning so I don’t feel guilty about sleeping so early. Especially after discovering my new love for sleeping in bed diagonally.
Till tomorrow.

“But why is it that India arrives only when the West says it does? Our movies have nourished half the world for a century, as every Russian cabdriver in Manhattan will tell you. And if the West is now waking up to our energy and confidence, will we be tempted to change? Will Oscar fever mean we temper our spice to suit Western palates? Will the few Indian actors and directors cherry-picked by Hollywood shove the khadi and brocade under the carpet and make chick flicks on Fifth Avenue?”– Mira Nair, Hooray for Bollywood

Read the entire article (especially if you’re a bollywood movie/future Namesake watcher) here

“I used to believe that my feminist politics would make me strong. I thought strong thoughts. I held strong beliefs. I thought that would protect me. But all it did was make me aware of how badly I slipped when I lowered my voice and apologized for having a divergent opinion. For all my right thinking I did not fight back. But I have learned something. I’ve learned it takes practice to be a strong feminist….It was nice to grow up thinking this was an equal world. But it’s not….And it’s amazing what you can see when you are not hiding behind the warm, fuzzy glow of past feminist victories. It does not make me popular in the office. It does not even make me popular with women. –Ellen Neuborne “Imagine my surprise”

There have been a lot of quotes I’ve been wanting to write down - people I know have been on a roll with saying brilliant things. But of course I can’t remember any of them. So there’s that.

Someone sent me the most beautiful message in the world, in regards to being able to relate to my posts. This made me feel so overwhelmed with hope. I love that woman so much. She is a fighter and is so inspiring. I hope she reads this and knows how I think of her everytime I write now.

Why do so many women crave to shed their skin? We’re constantly in need of validation about who we are, and as much as self affirmation becomes important, where else do we get it? It doesn’t seem to be the media and it doesn’t seem to be so many of the institutionalized programs and schools and systems and people around us. Where do we learn to affirm ourselves? Where do we learn to love ourselves without needing to be completed by someone else?

The skin I’ve wanted to shed is the remains of the skin that was built around me years ago. The one that depended on relationships and still felt awkward and inadequate around everybody. A part of that skin is never going to go away. Maybe it’s because I’m brown. Maybe it’s because I’m innately insecure. Who knows.

How does one shed that skin of insecurity to leave a new reclaimed one?

Wait! I remembered a quote. I’ll make it my title.

Anyone that knows me well knows how much it meant for me to read this in Sonja D. Curry-Johnson’s “Weaving an Identity Tapestry”:

“In college, conflicts did not lessen, but rather grew, both around me and within me. Here I had to decide what meant more to me, the attention and admiration of men, or my integrity as an independent woman. Unfortunately, there were times when my willingness to find and keep a boyfriend outweighed my desire to live my life honestly as my own person. During these times, I often placed the needs of the relationship over my own. It took a few years and a few broken relationships for me to reassess the importance of romantic love and to realize that there was no fantasy that was worth my denying any part of my identity. I decided not to become involved with a man unless I was sure he was the type of person that would not only accept my feminist ideals but also support my execution of them in my personal and professional lives. That type of man, in my mind, was a rare bird indeed. No sooner had I resigned myself to a life without romance, that I met such a bird and, in perhaps the least-debated decision of my life, married him.”