maggie touches grease with her hands

[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."

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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.

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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.

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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. )

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thanks to ciderpress for the space to talk.

Okay, um ... between Elizabeth Bear's Cease Fire post and annafdd's new one here, are people just ... not understanding what Swift was getting at when he wrote "A Modest Proposal"? Is there some kind of group-consciousness misconception going on, like how bunches of people thought Jimi Hendrix was singing "'scuse me while i kiss this guy'? Because SERIOUSLY NOW Y'ALL. Somebody explain this to me (hopefully through a comment that grasps the concept of satire).

Also: I was catching up on comments and on_earth enlightened me as to Avatar movie casting director DeeDee Ricketts' self-satisfied touting of her "skillz" as published on her website. Go look, it's a guaranteed good time.

disclaimer: "good time" may be understood to mean "laughing in disbelief that somebody could be so stupid" OR "tearing your hair out by the roots" OR "wondering how people like this are allowed drivers' licenses much less careers".

In closing, I liked this with regard to people getting pissed about being "pressured" to post about RaceFail 09. I don't think everybody needs to post. People process things in different ways. But taking the time to write a big angry screed detailing all the reasons you haven't and won't, paired with silence on the actual issues? What the hell is the point?

Oh, Internet.

It used to be good. I thought it was good, because I didn't really know better (although I knew enough to use a pseudonym, because I am a woman of colour and I was young), and I thought you really listened. I thought we were the same.

Then you started behaving hurtfully. I suspected it was my fault, my lack of education or my colonized mindset or any number of things I've been raised to feel ashamed about, but I had to face the facts.

You were full of people who saw me as shallow, or nothing, or lacking "good faith". And I decided it was getting too hard to be with you anymore.

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You see, I couldn't just decide not to have a conversation about race anymore, because it follows me home. My race issues ARE my home. Other people can pick them up when they want to look at something shiny, something exotic tasty foreign bright colourful strange exciting; they toss them around, try them on. Start to explain them to me and find different names for them, like classism and learning experience.

And then they get confused that those race issues, shiny, aren't also malleable submissive accepting pliant silent cowed controllable; they drop them, scowling, and complain that I should have warned them they might get pricked, especially as they were so well-meaning in their actions.

Well, I say, maybe you shouldn't touch things before you learn about them or know how to treat them with respect.

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The funny thing is, I ended up making more friends than anything else from this fight. Because I was finally able to see that I *wasn't* alone in feeling the way I did, and even though some white "progressives" will panic and act poorly when they think they're being accused of racism, actual white allies will not. They will stick around and apologize if they've hurt me, and they won't pretend that they're the Only Brave Ones who Speak The Truth, and they'll make a real undeniable *effort* to own their privilege and not co-opt spaces in discussions that aren't about them.

I realized that how pseudonymous people act on the internet to each other is an excellent marker of their good conscience.

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And the whole *other* set of friends I met? They're not golden-skinned, not exactly, but their hearts and minds are a different matter. They, like me, go home with their race issues and live them and love them and know that for all the pain there, our complex intersecting dark light in-between loud proud strong wounded eloquent issues were also a place of comfort and pleasure and beauty. When they say things I'm unsure about, I don't assume they missed something; I assume I have something to learn. I've read their joys and their laughter and found that they understand the cathartic power of mocking the wilfully ignorant, because this is (one of the many) coping strategies that chromatic people have developed, valid even if outsiders don't understand. I found that there was an entire new vocabulary opening up to me, words that felt round and sour-salt and soft in my mouth, nestling in my cheek and throat to wait until the time I'd need them.

I didn't realize how many people would listen to me speak and offer me love.

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I don't make modest proposals (because I have never seen anybody appropriate Swift and do it properly).

And I would never dream of telling anybody to "let it drop" when what "it" is ... is themselves.

My good conscience is intact, because it stands in companionship with all of you. The people allowed into my space have been supportive and investigative and witty and wise, and I cherish that because I know, now, the value of safe space. As well as the value of maintaining a voice no matter what, and the way a community can hold you up when you feel all slumpy and disillusioned.

I tend to wryness more than to sentiment, dear ones, but I cannot help but feel as though this is a gorgeous moment, right here. We're having conversations. We're going to keep having them. There's a whole big internet out here for us to finally talk.

This is my voice: maggie, brown and soft and sour-salt.

I want to hear yours, now and for the longest while.

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follow-up, and why i decided not to reply to comments here

Just in case any of y'all were led to believe that using the word "slumdog" to refer to Indian people is fun, jokey slang, please ... don't.

http://navia.livejournal.com/220989.html

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/02/26/slums-are-for-lovers/

http://www.musicindiaonline.com/n/i/top_stories/2867/ (ETA: I include this last one for his account of the term being used, not b/c I necessarily agree with his views on Mumbai.)

I love how when people like anna post a long, smart post about the repeating patterns of race discussions vis-à-vis Carol Thatcher and RaceFail 09, inevitably somebody will show up with comments not about the thought-provoking exploration of race politics and society, but asking, "what's a golliwog?" Despite anna putting TWO LINKS right next to the word so people could educate themselves before joining the conversation.

At this point it's like ALL discussions of race that aren't Racism 101 should come with disclaimers. I'm taking mine from Wyclef Jean's "Anything Can Happen":

Take this lesson to your next session
I suggest you practice with the freshmen
Sophomore, junior, then come check the senior
By then I would have graduated from the school of ruckus

I totally thought of this song when I read the reiterated bit of Willow's post and hell, it seems like a better and better idea by the moment.

In other news!! The people making the crappy whitewashed Avatar movie have turfed Jesse McCartney and replaced him with Dev Patel. Yay! ... except that Patel will be the Japanese-based bad-guy character (instead of brown-skinned Inuit goofball Sokka, which, um, DEV PATEL!! Shouldn't this be OBVIOUS?!?!) As the sister says, this is not a change that shows the producers understand their racism, it's tokenism so they can point to the lone brown dude and say, "hey, lookit, we're not racist!"

Anyhow, this campaign is clearly not over. Lori has set up an awesome Zazzle store that sells Avatar protest shirts/postcards/buttons, and she has also made all of her excellent graphics available free if you want to do your own printing and whatnot!