Putting Things Right

A while back, I had a go at Laurie of Penny Red. I feel pretty bad about that now, to be honest. Not that there wasn't some truth to what I said - but really, what was I expecting? That she should be able to represent the likes of me? Of course she can't; and it's totally unreasonable to expect such a thing of her. Furthermore, although I hope she ends up as an investigative journalist (I imagine she'd be super-duper at that!), she can do what she likes in the meantime. The whole thing did perhaps come off harsher than intended; essentially what I was saying is 'you can do better than this' when it comes to some of her writing...

But who made me an arbiter of what is good? Who am I to tell someone else (especially someone who ain't listening, haha) to 'do better'? This - this post right here - is about me trying to put things right. There's a lot that needs to be put right. This v. good and simple post on PR has inspired me to try and begin to do so, if nothing else.

What I was expecting of her is the same thing I expect of myself. To do better. To strive for perfection. To achieve consistency all the time, blah blah blah. As her post so ably describes, we are all prone to this tendency. It is worse in some ways for women, than it is for men. They're not free of it either, though.

I appear to have indulged in classic projection and lashed out at a fellow struggler rather than stopping and thinking about why I did that. Having said that, I do still want her to go on and become a Socialist Superwoman, and I sincerely hope that she won't lose sight of herself in striving to achieve success. That is a genuine warning, because in trying to sell an unpopular cause to people, one can find oneself unexpectedly compromised. Everyone knows that... I am also developing some rad-fem tendencies, thanks in large part to this blog (and the assholes on Cif but also seemingly EVERYWHERE ELSE on t'Interwebz!), and so I got a bit unfair on someone who I felt didn't have to be quite as 'feminist' as me.

How stupid is that, eh? You live and you learn, though, I guess. I think that is true of many Asian feminists though - there is quite a gulf between what they, and their white (middle-class...) counterparts are concerned with. That is nobody's fault. We have to deal much more with really barbaric things like honour-killings, and the pressure of being sandwiched between liberal society (not free of misogyny and sexism for all that...) and conservative families.

For example, Laurie mentions in her post how:

I've just been watching Meera Syal's documentary about self-harm, in which she asks, amongst other things, why Asian women in particular are so very high-acheiving and yet so desperately unhappy - being the group statistically most likely both to graduate with high honours and to deliberately hurt their bodies.

There you go. We have more freedom to work than is still permitted in India, Bangladesh, China et al (though those countries ARE, in some cases, getting better for women...) yet in many cases, our cultures don't sensitively adjust to this. Instead, it is expected that women will work full-time - AND be perfect slave housewives. It's not just the job market, but also the marriage market, we have to grey our pretty little heads over. British middle-class society also still has this mindset in many cases, but not in the same way as the Asian community.

Paradoxically, no-one wants to touch with a bargepole any woman who doesn't have a high-powered degree (that means I'm out of the running, eh?) - think Biomedical Sciences, Accounting, Medicine, Law... teaching as well. Yet in most cases, she also has to be a housewife. Getting 'lucky' involves all or any of the following:

a) Your husband doesn't hassle you about housework (for the most part) and/or sometimes even HELPS (aka my father).
b) You don't live with your mother-in-law.
c) Your mother-in-law doesn't expect you to become her.


Quite simply, you're not allowed to be thick, dark, rebellious or lazy. Given that I am both rebellious and lazy, my mum actually used to mutter: 'Thank God you have fair skin.' My mother has also tried repeatedly to break my spirit, claiming that she's just preparing me for my mother-in-law. Alongside this, she harangued both my sisters to learn Indian cooking (including how to make a full dinner in one go, even though NOBODY I know, us included, ever eats that). Despite both successfully doing so, she subsequently tried to blame all marital problems, especially my eldest sister's, on cooking.

So, my second-eldest sister and I have a lengthy discussion with my mum about how our brother-in-law is a psychopathic abuser, who enjoys publicly humiliating my sister and refuses to either let her come see us, or come to see us with her. This may last 20 minutes or longer. Mother nods agreeingly and even participates. Two minutes later, she is ranting about how it is all my sister's fault, and talking about cooking. (Although she dropped cooking-as-cause after about a year-and-a-half of ongoing strife...)

The thing is: my mum means well. 'Nine times out of ten,' she informed me with a faded bitterness, 'the woman must bend.' It didn't matter that I actually had a boyfriend at the time who cooked for me and shared the housework (at one stage when he briefly lived with me, just before finishing his degree, he was actually preparing every meal and doing all the washing-up while I worked on a project). She had seen what it is like for us Punjabi women, the sham of Sikh equality, and she wanted there to be no hope to so cruelly give way, treacherously feather-light, to betrayal and disappointment.

Despite having a decent boyfriend at the time, I could see myself falling into the patriarchy's tentacles. I sincerely believed that I would never make it to 21, and that if I did, I would find myself in a marriage that would eventually drive me to suicide. How could I continue my mother's cycle, and raise children that I resented? Why would I want to raise another child like myself, plagued by self-doubt and devoured by the family pack?

I was so hellishly afraid of this happening to me that I clung to my now-ex, despite not being happy. The fact that he largely didn't mean to upset me became a handy guilt-trigger, for when I wondered how the hell I could ever love him. I went through my degree, picking up Firsts and even winning a prize. The initial hostility of my family to my education choices gave way to a less-antagonistic but not-much-more-satisfying complacency. They told me 'Well done,' and then would add that I SHOULD be getting marks like that. Their congratulations were always severely compromised by the fact that they neither understood, nor particularly cared, WHAT I was good at. There was also an underlying assumption that what I was doing was not really that difficult or worthwhile.

This last attitude infected me deeply. It birthed in me a painful and schizophrenic feeling. I regarded my mute and detached contemporaries in seminar rooms with a kind of superior hatred. How many of them had been told that they would study English 'over my dead body' by their sisters? How many of them had earned the right to be there, like I had, and were capitalising on it feverishly, like I was?

Even as I felt like this, I kept myself 'humble' by reminding myself always, in a back corner of my brain, that I wasn't doing anything useful or important. But I was also doing French! But I wasn't going into business with it. Even though I hated the French part of my degree at times, it gave me a further edge over the other losers. Were they struggling like I was struggling? Did they have to dilute their favourite subject, just to be taken remotely seriously?

The evidently gigantic chip on my shoulder was carved into deeper by this 'humility' I enforced on myself. One of my best friends inadvertently contributed to it when she joined in with my mocking of other students saying that to those kinds of people, she would say: 'I'm doing SCIENCE, bitches.' I must never get above myself because literature was not essential to the world the way science was. Yet this attitude allowed me to mock those who were fanatically devoted when I didn't understand things - they were out of touch. They didn't see, like I saw, that science mattered more!

Ironic, really. I had tried to take science at A-level, had found it a nightmare (though definitely interesting) and then made a defiant show of taking arts at uni, because other people got to, so why shouldn't I? Deep down, though, I had internalised my family's beliefs and knew that I had failed at perfection. It was bad enough that I was lazy and rebellious, aware of the sexual inequality around me. Now, I had to mess up the career thing too. I was not ambitious enough to reply 'journalist' quick-fire when well-meaning people Qed me about what I would do afterwards.

The one thing that galvanised me above all else, was injustice. Especially the treatment of women by our community. I knew this wasn't exactly a 'career choice' though, and I resented that it was so deeply embedded in my being. I resented others, as just described, because they were normal. I superficially belonged to their world, but behind the facade of shared interests and economic/educational status or political views, lurked That Bloody Awareness. My aunt abandoned. My cousin, believed to be murdered. My other cousin, forced into marriage then deceived and abandoned. My sister, pushed into marriage when she was not, and might never be, ready.

These women were in me and with me, and I couldn't relax and make small talk like normal people. I'm still very socially inept.

[Interlude: My mother just came down because I am STILL up, and when I told her I was writing and that I had to do it, called me 'weird' and said 'You'd better come down to Earth, you're flying around in the clouds.' Thank you, mother...]

I was, and still am, wrong wrong wrong. Odd, and wrong. I'm the lightest in the family. I'm the only one who didn't pursue a science degree. I'm the first child (and until my brother, the only one) to have lived away from home. I'm also the only agnostic, and the only one to date two very 'wrong' men. One, a non-6-foot, non-Punjabi atheist. The second, a 6ft, fair-skinned, believes-in-God dreamboat... only he's a) white b) a historian, with a penchant for reasoned debate on just about everything. Given that my parents like to subscribe to Daily Mail worldviews and a, er, 'Sikh-centric' view of history, it's going to be interesting (i.e., the other day, they were watching a man talking about how Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a saint, and totally right to agitate for a separate Sikh state...). If they ever meet.

So ja, I am a spectacular failure. I plan on raking myself over the coals some more in later posts (ooh, what fun!). Even my body is all wrong for a supposed 'Indian' woman. I'm slightly taller than a lot of the Indian girls I see (despite being about average for a British woman), and I don't really look Indian at all. I'm most frequently mistaken for Iranian and Greek, but also Spanish. I'm not tiny and petite and delicate-looking. To quote Laurie again:

I weigh almost nine stone; I have fat on my upper arms... I have d-cup breasts, which I despise, and a tummy which no amount of sit-ups will flatten.

Sorry, Punjabi Sikh community of Britain! Sorry British society! I don't fit either of your notions of 'conventionally attractive.' Believe me, the shops have drummed it home by now that an apple-shaped body is NOT GOOD. I'm not Kelly Brook, and I'm not Freida Pinto either. I didn't trade in my plait and glasses for feathered/layers and contacts as soon as I hit 16. I want to aim for more than a car, a house near my parents and a husband that doesn't hit me. I won't pretend stoically that the guilt and shame that keep us locked into deceiving our parents and beating ourselves up are to be respected or tolerated.

Call me pathetically feminine if you will, call me 'coconut' and 'posh' and whatever else. I will cry in your faces about the fact that I have been, and still am, hurting. No 'put up or shut up.' How about 'fess 'up, or fuck off'?