(Dis)Locations
Crackle, Spark
In the home where I lived for a year, we lay the electric lines against the concrete walls in government housing ourselves. I joke about it now with Nancita when I can reach her in the long distance letters that take weeks to reach the Amazon, as though we live in different centuries. And I can’t talk to this woman who is my adopted sister, mother, and best friend, because in her century it’s hotter and the rain is pouring through the sunshine, the distance too soggy and long to bridge with words. It’s a far-reaching joke today, but when we were trying to figure out how to get the wires to stay, the question of tape was a very immediate problem.
Excuse me very much, but who forgets to use electrical tape when they are dealing with literal wires? The crackle every night would wake me, and we had to get them checked twice to be sure the job was done right, albeit with Scotch Tape in some of the wrong places.
Pilgrimage to Manasarovar
She had been sick for months. She was one of the first women in the hospital administration system in Calcutta and had fought with her bare hands and feet for her education. She was a fisherman’s daughter, a fisherman who learned to scribe and clawed his way up colonially rigidified social sub-castes. She actively wrestled and passively withstood hardship for her right to practice medicine. Against her caste, against her husband whom she married too young, against her children screaming for her to stay home.
She had fought, with her hands and teeth, for a medical degree that now served her not one whit. She was wasting. She was nauseous. She was waiting on a death sentence.
Facebook as Memoir: Identity & Self-Archivalism Today
The week immediately following spring break is the week to live voyeuristically in the breaks of others. On the walk back from the beach, a group of us laugh hysterically, remembering a few brilliant one-liners—not for the simple sake of appreciating our own cleverness, but because “from brain break to spring break” and “what if the ocean was made of tequila?” seem like apropos Facebook album titles.
An album title is more than a label. It’s ironic, really, our conversation, given that a few moments before we were lying on our towels, pointing out the bros on the beach with every variety of selfie stick under the sun (and in the crashing waves, and over their heads, and under the precariously placed lifeguard stand). A critical eye to a selfie stick quickly turns inward, leaving me wondering about the way we present our own experiences in self-archiving practices. It’s been written on extensively—are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. just monuments to our generation’s profound narcissism? Or are the applications doing something we haven’t yet managed to understand—what is the drive behind the mad rush to archive?
“No white people allowed:” The Power of a Separate Space
“Separate” is too easily read as a dirty word within our contemporary mode of moral thinking. We have come to inhabit a multicultural pluralism sharing the whitewashed bed of liberalism. But self-defined “separatism” is a thing of value. It gets erased in the language we use to talk about integration and desegregation, of diversity as inherently valuable. That same particularity of liberalism perpetuates the constant drive toward allyship.
What defines allyship is that it stands beside and with a movement that has had the chance to outline its own body, if only in chalk, on its own terms. The debate that takes place in a movement’s action and conversation is the debate among the people concerned, among the people who are being spoken of. There is no “speaking for” in an act of allyship, though there may be amplifying and an interrogation of the particular ways that we can use our positions of privilege to mobilize and enact change. But you do not put an army of cis men at the vanguard of a movement for gender justice. You do not situate a collective of white people at the head of a movement for racial liberation.
No footnotes
No footnotes
(A reflection on the way we compartmentalize our identities to make the presentation of a whole, normalized, and complete Self visible to others. How do we place ourselves in the realm of the recognizable?)