Facing up to anti-Muslim sentiment among Sikhs

So to another Pickled Politics thread. I thought I'd entered a parallel universe when I read the comments on the latest piece by Jai, titled 'British Sikh and Hindu groups release joint statement condemning EDL.' Besides the self-explanatory bit, Jai also provided some context with reference to the Sikh BNP and EDL members and set up a spiritual death-match between Guramit Singh of the EDL and Guru Gobind Singh Ji, the tenth guru of the Sikhs.

The first comment was by our dear Rumbold:

Jai:

While it is good that Hindu and Sikh organisations are condemning the EDL, as the EDL is trying to split Hindus and Sikhs from Muslims, a fair number of ‘mainstream’ Hindus and Sikhs are anti-Muslim; in my narrow circle I know three Hindu and Sikh girls who have been cut off by their families for dating/marrying Muslims. It would be nice to see these organisations attempt to tackle this bigotry too (which is, as you point out, against the teachings of the Gurus).

This is a perfectly fair point, and as someone who came to where I am now through witnessing the stunning bigotry of self-professed 'proper Sikhs,' I do agree wholeheartedly with it. I can't even fault the wording of it, really.

Which is where the parallel universe element came in, in comments in response to Rumbold. Firstly, Leon:

@ Rumbold,

I’m not sure why you’re raising this now, if I didn’t know you I’d say your comment looked like spite at best and at worst an attempt to spike the conversation.

There are issues within the Sikh and Hindu communities but there is also some very good work done within those communities as Jai has rightly shown here.

We need to support them when they’re doing right, and put pressure on them when they are doing wrong, but doing both at the same time just confuses the issue at hand, and sadly plays right into the hands of fascists and rightwing nut jobs like the EDL.

This comment left me aghast for a number of reasons. Earwicga endorsed it, saying 'What Leon said.' With admirable composure, Rumbold responded, touching upon a point I would go on to address:

Leon:

So groups release a statement condemning an Islamaphobic group. Good. I then wonder what they are going to do to challenge Islamaphobia in the wider Sikh and Hindu communities. That seems a reasonable point given the wider battle against anti-Muslim prejudice.

To return to the problems I had with Leon's post... I can fathom why he might have responded as he did (I'm not saying I'm right, merely speculating) - Rumbold being a white, middle-class man, could be seen to be effectively appropriating Sikh/Hindu/Asian concerns and voices. It seems almost as though Rumbold is being accused of concern trolling.

However, while Rumbold certainly cannot speak as a British Asian Sikh - neither can Leon, nor Earwicga. Leon is mixed-race and Earwicga is white. One way in which allies of minority communities - whether they're white, OR of another ethnic minority community - can fuck up is by enthusiastically shooting down people they perceive to be attacking a particular minority so that they, too, end up speaking 'for' that particular minority.

I am a British Asian Sikh - still in many ways culturally Sikh, if not religiously - and I am going to speak in that capacity, with full awareness that I do not represent every Sikh. I do, however, as a woman, represent a section of my particular minority group whose voices are barely tolerated, ignored, silenced and in many cases our opinions are just assumed. Being religion-free is even an advantage here, I would say, as it means I have no overriding interest in protecting 'the community'.

I've addressed the first point in Leon's comment - the defensive reaction to Rumbold's criticism, and I'll now address the second:

There are issues within the Sikh and Hindu communities but there is also some very good work done within those communities as Jai has rightly shown here.

This lazily trades on stereotypical assumptions that Pickled Politics itself started out trying hard to combat, with its fight against self-proclaimed 'community leaders'. There are no 'the Sikh and Hindu communities.' There are no closed, monolithic groups of Sikhs and Hindus as this statement implies. The reference to 'issues' is deliberately minimising - there are many 'issues' in Sikh and Hindu communities, just like there are in all communities, and reference to 'good work' is vague - so what? Christian missionary groups do 'good work' of various kinds - does this mean that they can't be criticised? I think not. A much more honest and accurate statement would have been to say:

There are issues with anti-Muslim sentiment within Sikh and Hindu communities but there is also some very good work done to combat it within those communities as Jai has rightly shown here.

The problem, of course, which both Rumbold and myself pointed out, is that actions do not necessarily equal words. As anti-racist activists and womanists know, it's easy to release a statement condemning the most extreme examples of bigoted behaviour in a community without addressing much more common casual bigotries. We are constantly told to take white people's condemnation of the BNP, KKK, etc. as proof that we are 'post-racial', for example, which is absolutely fucking laughable when you consider that there is an established, overwhelmingly white movement in the US to discredit the black President by claiming that he was not really born in America and is not therefore American and also that a bunch of middle-class white men on an inexplicably-popular BBC show recently made the most appalling comments about Mexicans - straight out of the Republican playbook - and got away with it in the name of 'humour.'

White people fall over themselves to defend racism (and other bigotries) on the grounds of 'humour,' 'irony', and sometimes evoke the current trendy dead horse, of 'privacy' as in this shockingly shit piece by Charlie Brooker. The fact that the people that they are belittling are equal human beings never seems to count as a serious point worthy of consideration, should make it clear that we are not, in fact, equal human beings. I have seen and heard members of my family make 'humorous' anti-Muslim comments, but on the whole, the anti-Muslim sentiment that I've seen in Hindus and Sikhs comes from deficient self-awareness, massive, massive ignorance about Indian history and the lack of a secular political discourse in India. I probably won't elaborate just now - I'll save it for another post - but these are things which need addressing quite urgently. Since organised religion is about the religious group, not just individual belief, the signatories to the statement need to make sure that they are actively working to combat anti-Muslim sentiment in their communities wherever possible, not just by (in the case of Sikhs) pointing out how important Muslims have been in aiding the Gurus in Sikh history, but by encouraging Sikhs and Muslims to interact socially and not treating religion as a zero-sum game. Just because the Abrahamic religions all have a tortured, competitive relationship with each other, does not mean that Sikhs need to play that game - can we not just set ourselves apart, in the way that Buddhists seem to have done?

On to Leon's final point, while left me utterly enraged. I've split it into two parts:

1) We need to support them when they’re doing right, and put pressure on them when they are doing wrong 2) but doing both at the same time just confuses the issue at hand, and sadly plays right into the hands of fascists and rightwing nut jobs like the EDL.

1) Who the fuck is this 'we', and who the fuck are 'them'? Just who speaks for who here? If, as I suspect, Leon's 'we' refers to the likes of Rumbold, Earwicga etc. - then I would say - good, you see that NONE of you has the right to frame this debate. It comes across as unbelievably patronising - somewhat reminiscent of cultural relativism. We don't really understand the Other, and we don't want to be seen to judge, so let's hold our noses and let 'them' self-regulate! I thought Sunny and PP's good work combating community leaders was supposed to expose how contentious all this 'we' and 'they' BS is. Do I not belong to 'they' because I am an atheist? Or because I am a woman? It's just that, the kind of people who have the official authority to issue these kinds of media-friendly statements, don't generally get to where they are by giving a shit about people like me. They generally try to discipline and/or disown me - I have had this happen with the Sikh commenters on PP as well as in 'real life.'

2) Reading this, you would think that the EDL have some kind of direct line to every media outlet, imminently on the verge of being voted into office/picked to present Desert Island Discs/hired to write for the Daily Mail. As Jai's post points out, these are people who are so thick that, despite having a non-Muslim of Indian descent in their ranks, they couldn't tell the difference between Muslims and Hindus:

The EDL’s previous claims to be opposed “only to militant Islam” are further thrown into question by the fact that, for example, in October 2010 they held a large demonstration in Leicester, a city where the majority of British Asians are actually Gujarati Hindus. Furthermore, the rally was held during Navratri, a major annual Hindu festival which is of particular importance to Gujarati Hindus and which occurs just a couple of weeks before Diwali itself. I expect an “anti-Islam” rally by the EDL outside the Hare Krishna temple in Watford is next; and yes, I’m obviously being sarcastic, but you get my point.

While the bigotry of such a group should never be underestimated, we British Asians should also not have to carry with us the perpetual fear that 'something might happen.' This is our country too and we have just as much right to it as fuckwit bigots - our parents and predecessors took on racists more shameless and violent than this, in a public climate vastly less favourable to them (I think it was mentioned in the Sanjeev Bhaskar episode of The House That Made Me that during the Southall anti-NF demo in which Blair Peach died, the police were protecting the racists - I wouldn't be surprised). Central to that is not just highlighting the odd PR moment of 'unity' and trying to educate people about religious history, but acknowledging that people do say these anti-Muslim things in our community and taking them on. Failing to do so simply encourages a 'business as usual' approach where people provide the odd utopian soundbite and then go back to segregated lives of fear, ignorance and communalism.

I have also come to have a major bee in my bonnet about this 'you can't do two things at once' bollocks. It reeks of culturally-relativist arguments, as I said above, laden as it is with the sense of giving cookies. Let me explain the feminist concept of 'giving cookies' (WARNING: no actual cookies involved):

A feminist cookie is the term for the reward some men seem to be seeking for saying or doing something feminist. (There are equivalents for, eg, white people and being anti-racist or straight people and being anti-homophobia.)

In short, when people ask for cookies, they are essentially seeking credit where it's not really due. It's like when my brother thinks he should be thanked for loading the dishwasher, when my mum has done it every day for over 20 years. Even when people/groups aren't or don't seem to be seeking cookies, that doesn't mean they should be given. This goes back to what I was saying about Leon's comment being patronising: why t-f should we give these prominent Sikhs and Hindus cookies for releasing a statement?! How many people in their congregations are going to actually read or process it? Furthermore, how does effectively saying 'Islamophobia is bad, it hurts us all, I despair of it' actually translate to standing with our Muslim brethren? If there are actually going to be efforts in place, from here, to increase understanding between people, then great. My parents and family know that anti-Muslim sentiment is bad, which is why they get so defensive when I contend that Muslims are people too - it doesn't stop them from making bigoted throwaway remarks and going on lengthy rants about how Muslims are 'taking over' which verge on BNP/EDL rhetoric.

As a result of the way I was raised, I had a lot of pre-conceptions about Muslims and apprehension about social contact with them. A co-worker and students at my university helped me to start dumping the dirt from my mind, and then I met ACTUAL MUSLIMS via another job and Pickled Politics and a former Islamist is now one of my best friends. I still have my issues with Islam, but I have TRIED to challenge what was presented as reality to me. That is the kind of thing we need if we want to make a difference.

Ironically, given the reference to 'divide and rule' in the statement itself, Leon employs that classic tactic against dissent when he says that:

doing both at the same time [praising and criticising Sikh and Hindu groups for their reaction towards anti-Muslim sentiment in their ranks] just confuses the issue at hand, and sadly plays right into the hands of fascists and rightwing nut jobs like the EDL.

As I said in my angry comment in the thread - this tactic was used against women during the nationalist movement. Indian men emotionally blackmailed women in the emergent women's movement, presenting them with a choice between rights for women and rights for the nation as if the two were incompatible with each other. The idea of women as a transcendent political grouping threatened the oppressive edifice that nationalism was built on - the bodies of women imprisoned within the home, Indian clothes and domesticity. Thus Gandhi could present himself as being on the side of the suffragettes, while he promoted deeply regressive ideas about women that reduced them to a male-created ideal of femininity even whilst fetishising this ideal. The result, as Geraldine Forbes points out, was 'the development of [...] 'feminist nationalism'' in which female activists and their energies were co-opted to the national cause - exactly as happened with British feminists during the First World War.

Furthermore, it is not the '70s and '80s any more. A lot of British Asians feel comfortably settled here now, and the urgency that drove them to overcome their prejudices and unite with people they are normally so dismissive of - blacks, Muslims, etc. - isn't pressing any longer. There is never a 'right time' for criticism, as the Egyptian protests show - you just have to seize your moment, and a moment when cookies are uncritically being given to organisations for being seen to be 'doing' something is just perfect for me. Shocking though it is, I think we are all adult enough to handle the idea of communities as being permanently complex and multi-faceted, not lurching between 'doing right' and 'doing wrong' and capable of doing only one or the other at once. Implying that questioning - not even criticising - the groundwork beneath a PR gesture, is somehow selling everyone out to the racists, is rather low.

I'll try and return soon to elaborate on the problem of anti-Muslim sentiment among British Asian Sikhs (and Hindus), and consider the misunderstandings that fuel it.

Considering Amy Chua

If the name 'Amy Chua' doesn't resonate at all, then hopefully the words 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' will.

For anyone still scratching their head, Amy Chua is a Harvard law professor who has written a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It's caused a fair amount of controversy because, as this Guardian piece notes, it 'makes case [sic] for ultra-strict Chinese parenting':

The Tiger, Chua explains, is "the living symbol of strength and power", inspiring fear and respect. And as a "Tiger mother" herself, she assumed the absolute right to dictate her children's activities and demand rigorous academic standards of them at all times, ridiculing them if necessary to spur them on to greater efforts.

Except - as was quickly pointed out, but perhaps not quickly enough - the book is not actually a parenting guide, but a memoir. Even the article cited describes it as 'an autobiographical study of the failings of western parenting by Yale law professor Amy Chua'. Which is pretty objectionable since, as this interview with Chua and her family (three days after that article above) shows, the book could more accurately be described as being about the failure of Tiger parenting:

The book bares all about how the parenting model worked for her older daughter Sophia, now 17 and heading off to an Ivy League college, but backfired dramatically for her younger girl, Louisa, or Lulu, who is now 14.

Besides offering some important clarification, the interview also threw up some interesting points for consideration. Obviously, since the book hasn't even been published yet, I haven't read it - but on the basis of what I know so far, I'm-a get my lit-crit on. First off, QUOTES! We are told that:

At its heart, Battle Hymn is an account of the psychological warfare between a "Chinese" mother and her "western" daughter

Is it really that simple though? I'm going to follow the Golden Notebook method: mention a few other striking details, and then elaborate (super-striking bits in bold, of course):

"My husband kept warning me and my sisters kept warning me. But I guess it's part of my personality. A little bit rash. For me, so much of my book is making fun of myself through the words of my children. And some people get that. Other people read it straight. My older daughter said, 'Mummy, you put only the most extreme stories in. People don't realise how much fun we had'."

What Chua didn't put in the memoir, she says with a hint of regret, is all the good times. "All the way through, Jed was bringing balance to the family, insisting that we were going to go on family bike rides and to Yankees games and apple-picking and water slides and bowling and mini-golfing, so we socialised a lot actually …" ("My mum has a touch of the dramatic, and she's much nicer in real life," Sophia says to me later by email. "She lets me go to rap concerts with my friends and do archaeological digs in our backyard – not very 'Chinese' activities!")

Chua's description of her intentions certainly sounds more in keeping with the mode of writing a memoir - and acceptable - than what most people initially assumed. From the first article I linked to:

Chua argues that western parents. with their emphasis on nurturing their children's self-esteem and allowing free expression, have set their children up to accept mediocrity. "Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently," she says.

You might say 'On what basis do they assume strength? On the basis of projection?' This certainly seems supported by the claim that: 'The Tiger [...] is "the living symbol of strength and power", inspiring fear and respect. The 'Tiger mother' is strong, ergo their offspring must also be strong. All of which begs the question: why would a parent project? With due reference to the character of Erica Sayers - aka Natalie Portman's character's mum - in the just-released film Black Swan - parents often project because they see their child as an opportunity:

the heroine's mother (Barbara Hershey) is an ex-dancer who gave up a career to raise a daughter in whom all her hopes are invested.

Indeed, Chua describes childhood as "a training period, a time to build character and invest in the future." However, I couldn't help wondering if the culture clash with Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is less to do with the cultural clash between Chua and her younger daughter, and more to do with the cultural clash within Chua herself. As Chua remarks in the interview: "When I show this book to immigrants and immigrants' kids, they were like, exactly, this is how it is. It's funny, they relate, it's not controversial for them." Indeed, I was alerted to the existence of a Tiger Mother meme generator via a Facebook link, which included comments from people on their 'Tiger' parenting experiences. I was also put in mind of how I related to my black and Asian secondary-school friends more than a white friend who complained about her parents setting a curfew for her to return from going out with her boyfriend - I wasn't allowed to date, let alone go out on my own after 8.30! There are groups on Facebook making fun of Punjabi, Nigerian and all number of strict (generally ethnic-minority) upbringings - but I would hesitate to describe such groups and their members as celebratory. Perhaps for some people there is a celebratory element, but I can't help thinking the key is in Chua's remark that 'it's funny, they relate'. We often need to relate, and to laugh about, certain experiences in order to create distance from them, and reassurance, for ourselves.

Indeed Chua talks of her own Chinese parenting:

"For my senior prom, my father finally said I could go – as long as I was home by 9pm! That was around the time that most people were heading out [...] When I was little I was so mad at them all the time. Why can't I do this? Why are there so many rules?"

It's worth noting also that Chua's husband, Jed Rubenfeld, is Jewish-American and that she 'grew up with her two sisters in the midwest, the daughter of first-generation immigrants from the Philippines.'

Now, only anyone who's from a diasporan background can really understand this - but first-generation immigrants (as I know all too well), classically, become stuck in the mindset of the country they left when they move. They will often see themselves as representative of that national community - e.g. 'We are Indian... This is how Indians behave' - when in actual fact they are simply representative of how that country was when they left it. The country itself will change - in the cases of India and China, that has been incredibly rapid, massive change - in their absence and if they are not aware of how time-specific their vision of it is, fail disastrously to live up to their expectations of it when/if they try to return. This 'dislocation' is a well-mined theme in literature (just consider Chanu in Brick Lane, who, once his ambitions fail to be realised, begins to retreat into and promulgate the superiority of Bengali culture to his family before actually 'going home' near the novel's end). How exactly diasporans come to be that way I can't say, but disappointment, disillusionment, racism, segregation and isolation are pretty big factors. All too often, feeling themselves cut off, immigrants want to create a 'home away from home' and the weight of representation of a distant, land, people, language and tradition is inevitably offloaded onto their children's shoulders.

I wonder if this is the hidden story in BHotTM. The point I was trying to make earlier (rather clumsily) is that Chua's book reaches for what is essentially a stereotype - both in the 'Tiger mother' symbolism, a stereotype of 'Chineseness' which sounds like it comes straight out of the corniest martial-arts flick and the stereotypical figure of the Strict, Non-white Immigrant Parent that is familiar to so many. In her own words, the book is a parody of herself, but it also seems to be a parody - and an interrogation - of what it means to be second-generation Chinese-American. Pressure is often piled on diasporan ethnic-minority women to be 'mothers of the nation' (i.e. marry within our own communities) because whilst the patriarchal beliefs that reduce a woman to being worth less than a man are still present in the US etc., the social structures are not in place for controlling women's access to men who value them differently (not necessarily always higher, unfortunately). You can't use shame, guilt and fear in the same way to police people's behaviour. Indian society, in contrast, is still effectively self-segregating on a gender basis in many areas and generally a man and woman are only seen together in public if they are married or related. Maybe Amy Chua's parents were didn't-bat-an-eyelid-fine with her marrying a Jewish whiteboy, but I would be very shocked if they were. 'Marrying out' as the very term itself implies, suggests an attempt to escape, or reject, the culture/community/whatever of the parents - whether that's actually intended or not.

Besides this, there is the interesting fact that Chua's parents are Chinese - but they moved to the US from the Philippines. Given that Chinese =/= Filipino, this means that they had either moved to the Philippines before Chua was born, or were themselves the children of Chinese immigrants to the Philippines. This would potentially put Chua not one, but two, removes from her 'Chinese heritage'. Those of us who are second-gens know personally how bizarrely the relation to the 'motherland' can impact our lives, and as I've said earlier, it's been a frequent theme in literature. The question of 'what it means to be Chinese/Indian/African/whatever' often creates a great deal of expectation and fear since we are expected to simultaneously perform the identity and make sense of it. Goodness Gracious Me offers a sublime (and hilarious) example of what I mean. I wonder if Chua's monstrous, ridiculous 'Chineseness' is the product of a double displacement - the further you are from the 'motherland', the more you must 'represent' so as not to lose your sense of self, which is often traumatised by the act of submerging oneself within a new, frequently hostile space - 'Chineseness'-as-parody. I would speculate that because the self is more 'socially formed' in India and China (many tend to grow up without the kind of time or space for introspection, which is essential for self-awareness, due to tradition and poverty among other things), immigrating to Western Europe or America is that much more traumatic than it would be for, say, an Australian making the same move. The conditions under which the self develops are no longer there, and so for identity to be maintained, you have to work that much harder - and thus you can become a parody. Hence the phenomenon of children of immigrants who are more conservative/bigoted than their parents - something I have personally experienced and is also apparently a factor in the emergence of 'home-grown terrorists'... This also used to be observable on a class scale in the UK and arguably still is, to some extent, though much less so.

The final point, which is both separate and related, is to do with birth order. A recent study, splashed all over the papers, added to a growing body of research on the effect of birth order on personality in finding that second-born children are more rebellious and adventurous than their older siblings:

"These findings are consistent with the idea that firstborns conform more, while second-borns are more likely to rebel."

It was Chua's second daughter who broke her Tiger resolve. In the interview, it is her eldest daughter who defends her, and who makes this comment:

"When we were younger, I thought my mum favoured Lulu, but as I've got older, we've become so close. It's not really the focus of the book, but my mum and I are incredibly similar. She understands me and always knows what I'm thinking."

The patient, obedient first-born, unable to rebel against the authoritarian parent due to having been made an example for the younger sibling... harbouring her own resentment about her mother, but wanting overwhelmingly to have her conformance to the established order rewarded, before finally having her conformance approved and rewarded... Funnily enough, this sounds not unlike what Chua said about her childhood:

"When I was little I was so mad at them all the time. Why can't I do this? Why are there so many rules? But looking back now, my parents gave me the foundation to have so many choices in life. After I left home I had a choice of who I could be, a choice of careers, a choice of schools, so I deeply believe in the model."

Chua, too, was an older sibling - she mentions a younger sister with Down's syndrome. She would therefore have been under the pressure to 'represent' that is unique for first-born children and her belief in the 'Tiger' parenting method (she is rather aptly described as having a 'missionary zeal' for it) comes quite naturally, as a result of her having accordingly been 'rewarded' as a dutiful oldest child with more intimacy and attention from her parents. I don't know if her younger sister is married, but assuming she's not - it's worth wondering what kind of pressure that might have created on Chua as a potential 'mother of the nation.' It seems as though the 'Tiger parenting' offered her a ready access of Chineseness - it must be mentioned also that in many Asian cultures (and I'm sure this is to some extent true for the Chinese) - motherhood is the only real source of power a woman has - which is why this kind of parenting may take on a certain glamour. It becomes a perversely macho act, because it enables a woman to stray from the path of pleasing femininity and be angry, vicious, violent and resentful - i.e. have the freedom to be a real, fallible person like a man - but directs all that energy towards a socially-sanctioned purpose and cages her in a domestic setting. There is also an oddly macho note to those who talk about 'surviving' upbringings like Chua's and the frequent one-upmanship as people compare stories.

Chua got to experience both the macho pleasure of enduring such a childhood - and the macho pleasure of being the matriarch - and what's truly significant is not her belief in the Tiger method, but the fact that it failed. I can't help being put in mind somewhat of the trend among young, predominantly white middle-class women for 1950s-style retro domesticity - but of course, often when they are actually living it, they get real quick. As Chua herself acknowledged, she was only really able to do the 'Tiger mother' thing because her husband acted as a balance, and then it became exhausting and alienating and she gave it up. If you aren't from a massively poor background, and you're not in an unequal relationship, being raised within a society that is relatively open, free and accepting... in short, if you're not particularly frustrated or thwarted in any way, the usual drivers for the Tiger model aren't really there. So why else might it appeal to somebody? One reason would be paying homage to one's own parents, acknowledging their sacrifices and honouring your relationship with them - which I think is what Chua, in dutiful-firstborn mode - was trying to do. When you strip away the motivating factors I've mentioned, it makes it hard for Tiger parenting to work - but it also exposes what I feel is the key reason that it is felt to work, which is devoted, full-on love and attention. First-borns, and only children, generally get that love and attention full-on, and so it's no wonder that Chua would turn to the way of the Tiger - but equally, love and attention don't need to be, and generally aren't expressed, brutally. As Chua herself says: "I have many regrets … I have a head full of regrets. I worry that by losing my temper so much and being so harsh and yelling so much that, by example, I will have taught my daughters to be that way, and I'm now constantly telling them not to do that." The interview describes the book as her 'atonement' and breaking the rule of silence that's all too common in Asian families to atone publicly is pretty significant. She describes the writing of the book as being like 'family therapy', but I wonder if it doesn't also serve as a sort of cathartic therapy for herself, allowing her to both pay tribute to her parents and assert herself as separate from them at last?

So there you go - discipline, sustained love and attention, good; pseudo-spiritual authoritarianism and all that that entails, not so good. There is a real, ambivalent person at the heart of the Tiger Mother after all - and that's enough Amy Chua!

Me and Charlotte Hatherley

I've had a bloody busy summer, as is amply evidenced by the glaring lack of posts here. At times I would have what seemed like a worthwhile idea, then either change my mind or forget what I was thinking of blogging. After the intensity of my Master's dissertation, which I submitted in late August, I kept myself busy with a plentiful supply of temporary work right up until the 25th of September. Since then, due to our lack of a kitchen and my desperate need for a break from EVERYTHING, I put job-hunting on the back-burner for a little while to rest and (this second part was not intentional, but I've found myself having little choice in the matter) face up to various personal issues that the imminent onset of Full-On Adulthood has re-woken. My deep rooted sense of insecurity and absolute worthlessness has re-emerged with a vengeance in the last few days, likely due to several factors (facing the void of the future, not getting a job I was led to believe I had a really good chance of getting, no temporary jobs and the lack of kitchen, which looks set to extend beyond the initial week to two whole weeks). Some of my closest friends have also had major emotional dramas of their own to contend with recently, which isn't particularly good; the impact of such things always reverberates across all of a person's relationships to some extent.

To summarise: EMO! I am more than a wee touch emo at the moment. As I have come to realise though, emo cannot be resolved, only managed. So how the hell to do that? What could I use to leach the figurative impurities from my system? Music was an obvious, but welcome, possibility. Yet there's something about music which many have remarked before - it really escapes our control and might not have the effect it's supposed to have, or that you want. For example, as a teenager, I was always under the impression that listening to critically-acclaimed, stereotypically-angsty music such as Radiohead, or the Smiths, or the Cure or whatever else, whilst upset, was some kind of a therapeutic process. The music would draw out one's emotions in a manner both healing and culturally elegant, surely? The fact that my ex-boyfriend really went in for critically-acclaimed music (of the above list, Radiohead in particular), made me certain that the use of miserabilist music to treat sadness was an experience that I absolutely had to try at some point.

Unfortunately, as my ex went through his lengthy periods of misery, gorging himself on Ryan Adams in particular, my theory fell apart. From what I could see, the music provided him with a sort of reflection of his depression to wallow in. There was nothing therapeutic about the experience of listening to it - and indeed, I began to wonder what listening to a record apparently rejected as 'too depressing' by Adams's record company was doing to my then-boyfriend. Was it a way of validating his unhappiness, measuring it against a greater one (apparently Adams's girlfriend had died of cancer)? Or was it only making things worse, making him feel like his wasn't a real sadness, against the artist's? Whatever the point, it was a self-indulgent experience which didn't really help my ex to overcome his issues. Being young and foolish, I was the lifebuoy, pouring all my energies into keeping him 'on the surface' as it were. I tried the misery-music route, and it only made me feel frustrated and irritated.

Just yesterday, sadness and music and how they fit together came up with a male friend who is sometimes prone to serious depression and had been feeling quasi-suicidal. Like my ex, this friend likes to wallow in what I see as depressing music rather a lot. He used to be obsessed with Elliott Smith - who committed suicide. Currently, he loves Sparklehorse - whose singer, Mark Linkous survived an OD in 1996 (while on tour with Radiohead!) only to commit suicide earlier this year. I'm sure that some of my statements so far will have got some bristling, but I'm no musical authoritarian - I never stopped my ex listening to whatever, nor my friend, and I'm perfectly aware of the incredible power of sad music. What really intrigued me was why the use of it to manage my sadness doesn't work for me - I've tried it a few times, but it just makes me feel sort of blank. Part of the answer may lie in my pragmatism - writing this has made me realise that my notion of music as a 'cure' may seem almost clinical, compared to the romantic tendencies of some. However, I realised that there may also be a gender element to things.

Now, this will involve some avowed generalisations, but nonetheless - I've noticed that a lot of miserabilist music, and the majority of its consumers, is overwhelmingly male (and white). Think about it - all the bands/artists I mentioned above, for example, are male (and white). As I considered it further, I realised that works by these and related artists have also been established as 'authentic' emotion by mostly-male, mostly-white critics. Yet none of them did anything for me when I was sad. I would often turn to Hindi music, largely sung by women; sometimes I turn to Bat For Lashes, KT Tunstall, Etta James - it varies greatly. One artist has become my go-to: Charlotte Hatherley. The release of her second album was a pleasant shock to my system, compared to her more teenage, straightforwardly pop debut. The third album, wildly inventive, and retaining much of the emotional feel of the second album, has become an obsessive favourite. In short, it seems that feminism was at work in my mind without my even realising.

How so? Well, the fact is that pretty much all the bands that I've listed, and so many others, being male and white, project an image of sadness that is actually quite unique. This isn't any sadness, this is privileged sadness. This is sadness as coming from a person who is nonetheless lucky enough to have the time/money/support to express that sadness in recorded form, and have it given out to effectively the whole world, whether for love or money. It's 'real' sadness, 'noble' sadness, the mythical sadness of the tortured artist that everyone loves to look for and believe in, especially critics. The predecessors of these men in history were also, as far as we can see, white and male (consider that the modern-day 'tortured music artist' stereotype has been lifted from the 'tortured poet/artist' one) and therefore it is almost as if there is an expectation, a God-given right that they should be whiny or mopey over the length of a whole record (or several) and praised for it, to boot. Perhaps because it's seen as relatively abnormal for men to express emotion in our culture, when they do it in record form, other men are all over it like a rash because it's a 'safe' way for them to express their own feelings, as if by proxy. The whole 'tortured sadness' thing is also (mistakenly, in my view) associated with gravitas, creating the impression that there is something honourable about men feeling sorry for themselves, which is of course great for getting the ladies... Being overwhelmingly white and male, many critics can relate to such expressions of sadness more than I can, and thus trumpet such work as important, whilst unwittingly exposing the artificiality or 'temperedness' of it by highlighting the carefully-worked, re-edited and intricate musicianship of it.

While I don't doubt that the emotions inspiring the work are genuine (especially in the case of those who committed suicide), the fact is that it doesn't chime with my experience. As an Asian woman, the world doesn't have much time for my grief. Within Indian culture, persistent ignorance about mental illness means that depression is something that is often seen as just temporary, or even laziness, and the individual is supposed to 'get over it' without expecting too much sympathy or help from relatives. As a woman, open expression of sadness is not sexy and can lead to being viewed as tragic; there is also the fear of confirming the long-standing association of women and mental illness. Perhaps part of the reason why male brooding is so praised is precisely because, deep down, men aren't really expected to be mentally ill and/or expressive, and so when they are, it comes across as somehow revolutionary. Whereas women expressing grief is almost pedestrian; hell, the media will even play up apparent mental illness as if female grief on its own isn't enough: think of Amy Winehouse, for example, or Britney Spears. Besides all this, there is the fear of reinforcing racial stereotypes of Asian women as downtrodden, abused victims - Cinderella-types. When I am upset, I know that generally only my non-white friends will really be able to understand certain things, and even if I blog my feelings or write a poem, it's not going to receive critical appreciation and be held up as The Authentic Expression of Heartbreak, or whatever (not that I want that).

As an Asian woman, I am expected to be at the disposal of family members and doing the household chores all the time; as a partner and friend, I am often relied upon whilst knowing that I cannot similarly rely on others - or at least, not as regularly. The simple inconvenience of two people having massive issues at the same time aside, I've found that often if you're in a 'senior' position to others emotionally - giving them advice and holding them together in tough times - it's often too much of a shock for them when you fall apart, for them to really help you. Almost like seeing your dad cry, or something. In our success- and work-obsessed culture, depression is an inconvenience. Therefore, I don't have the luxury of working my grief into a potentially best-selling record - I have to find a way to manage it quick whenever it pops up again, whether it's by running from it, purging myself or even a mixture of both. I find that Radiohead, etc., don't really do sadness justice. It was funny, because my male friend defended his love of downbeat music by saying that he finds sadness to be the most beautiful and complex of emotions. You wouldn't know that from a lot of acclaimed white male artists, though. They often cover subjects that women and non-white men cover too - whether in pop, hip-hop or other musical forms - such as failed relationships, existential angst and bereavement. They just do it less directly, and with more artistry and elaboration. Considering something from a distance does not necessarily render it automatically more complex.

Which brings me back to Charlotte Hatherley. Describing her music to my friend, I explained that, even though she doesn't try to churn out indie-band pointed witticisms, or create complicated narratives or 'concept' albums, there is an overriding, unmistakable mood to her last two albums which utterly envelops me (I'm going to go on to mention tracks mostly from her second and current albums, The Deep Blue and New Worlds). She is white, and yes, hers is guitar music, but otherwise I feel like she doesn't kowtow to racially-influenced expectations of music (i.e. 'urban' music must always be by black people, whilst everything guitar-based is for white people). I mean, how many white female solo artists do you know whose key instrument is a guitar?! Pitchfork, in the first review really worthy of her work that I've ever seen, called her 'refreshingly out of step with most of her contemporaries.' Discussing her current album, New Worlds, the reviewer perceptively observes:

Hatherley is [...] a deceptively clever guitarist [...] Rather than attempt to evoke a state of synesthesia in the listener, Hatherley articulates a synesthetic point of view in her lyrics. The tell-don't-show approach is typically a misstep, but it makes perfect sense here, as the album's most thrilling bits come when she's excitedly explaining sensations and epiphanies that don't fully translate outside the boundaries of her imaginative mind. The point is not to totally grasp her crackpot color-coded cosmology, but instead to relate to the feeling of rediscovering the world and opening up to new possibilities.

The primary tension, both musically and lyrically, on New Worlds is between disciplined focus and wild hair intuition. It's not a binary opposition, though, but instead a cycle that enables an artist to effectively communicate their ideas.

The first thing to note about Charlotte Hatherley is that compared to, say, Radiohead, her music is distinctly poppy. This, I suspect, is partly why she's not taken as seriously as male artists of similar talent; her songs are infectious and you often enjoy them on first listen. You don't have to give her albums several spins before having an epiphany; the music approaches you on friendly terms. Secondly, her lyrics don't, as I said, tell fancy stories or try to reinvent the love-song wheel. On the single I Want You To Know, she sings: 'Oh baby, are you sad and lonely? Well, I'm just doing fine/I want you to know.' The shudders that such a line sends down assorted music snobs' backs! Yet - and this is the principal reason I love her - there is more to her than meets the ear. The term 'deceptively clever', as employed above, is spot on. Listening to songs such as Love's Young Dream again, you notice new sounds that didn't emerge before (such as the man's whisper in the chorus, slightly unnerving); the true complexity of the music starts to become more apparent. There is a remarkable consistency of quality on the albums which means that once you exhaust the pleasure of listening to each as a whole, individual songs start to assert themselves further. And that's another reason why I love her; unlike massively-hyped bands such as, say, the XX, she doesn't do hit and miss. There's generally only one or two 'dud' tracks at most, and even then, they're not necessarily even duds but just ones that might not fit your mood at a particular time. I don't find myself bored with her. I often skip 'Siberia,' for example, but there's no denying that it's a good song.

On to the main reason why I love her so fricking much, though: she does sadness justice. If male artists make sadness boring, one-dimensional and self-indulgent, she brings it to life. Sadness in her music is multifaceted. She expresses certain elements of sadness - nostalgia, wistfulness and fear - which seem to me to be under-explored by a lot of straightforwardly miserable music and does so with subtlety that makes it feel stunningly genuine. Crucial to this is the interplay of lyrics and music - my harping on about her obviously can't do that justice. On Dawn Treader, for example, she juxtaposes fear about the future with grief for her lost childhood; the song expresses her fears about her relationship, but this is done with reference to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third novel in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series:

(First verse)
In the night, I dream that it's over
On thin ice and tipping the balance, oh no...
Oh, not again...

From afar, the Dawn Treader has come
Here to save us, all into the shredder...
Oh, once again...

(Chorus)
Our one and only life
Put underneath the knife
Oh, what will happen to
The me and you I love?

One of the most painful and traumatic experiences of our lives is saying goodbye to childhood and forcing ourselves to grow up. This is pretty neatly demonstrated by much of the reaction (critical and public) to Toy Story 3. The past often hurts, and Charlotte Hatherley acknowledges this repeatedly in her work. She - and we think - that the Dawn Treader will come and save us, like the heroic fantasies of our childhood. However, in a Freudian twist, it is the familiar become unfamiliar - actually a 'bad ship' and a harbinger of doom. This revives the pain of lost childhood; as adults, no fantasy figures are going to come and rescue us, yet we often don't feel much more in control than we did as children. The song thus subtly but effectively communicates those pre-emptive feelings of terrible fear and loss we get when we don't know where a relationship is going, but suspect it might end badly.

Yet acknowledging the pain of the loss of childhood does not necessarily mean that CH wallows in sentimentality. In Love's Young Dream, she asks her mother frankly about the relationship between her parents before she was born:

(First verse)
When you were younger
Precious lover
What did he look like
Was he as beautiful as you?
How did it feel when you were together?
Did you surrender?
I can't imagine it at all -

And oh I wonder how you were

And I really wanna know about your love
Your love
Do you remember?

(Chorus)
(Love's young dream)
Back when you were -
When you really were -
Do you remember?
(Love's young dream)
Back when you were -
When you really were -

Can you understand?

(Second verse)
I don't remember a single moment
When you were happy
I can't remember it all (don't remember it at all)...
You only told me how it unfolded
All of the stories, oh many, many many, I know -

Oh, but what I really wanna know about is your love
Your love
Do you remember?

etc.


This song gets me excited as I've realised that it is actually quite feminist - instead of trying to whitewash her parents' relationship for the sake of her own peace of mind, Hatherley tries to engage with and imagine her mother beyond her role as her mother, as a person in her own right.


I've just realised that the sense of loss in her songs is often extremely apparent, which is why I find them so visceral. Wrong Notes, the final track of New Worlds, is in some ways similar to Dawn Treader in linking the loss of the past with the uncertainty of the future. I think it is about her desire to be loved for who she is, 'warts and all' and simultaneously, her acceptance of herself as a flawed and full being:

(First verse):
Running hands over keys
Up and down all the strings
Give me immediate
Sensations, waking everything -

Run your hands over me
Up and down all the strings
Give me immediate
Sensations, waking everything -

(Chorus)
But not so nice, not so nice now -
The wrong notes, are all right
And part of me, part of me, yeah
Will you stay by my side,
By my side?

I cried to this song without fully understanding why. The distinct mix of defiance and fear palpable even in the lyrics cited above, and notable in a lot of her music, is part of it, I think. As a woman, I relate to the overriding sense of hope greatly - many women have to 'feel the fear and do it anyway' as that famous self-help book is called; we don't have the option of shutting down with sadness as men often do, because women do most of the crucial but unpaid/underpaid and undervalued work in the world, like caring for elderly relatives! There's a bit which repeats and extends the lyrics of the second verse, which made me bawl even harder:

Hey you, yellow and powder blue
Plum brandy by the sea
Gold, red and ruby shoes
I'd like you to come with me -

Hey you, holding me up to the light
Where all the notes are bright
And there's a part of me
My darling -

The images here are so strongly evocative of childhood, it's unbelievable. I never went to the seaside as a child, but even just from reading stuff like Enid Blyton, I hear the mentions of plum brandy and the sea and bright colours and think of childhood. When she talks of being held up to the light, I think of that idyllic happiness when you're a very young child, and you remember being held, talked to, loved... my stomach is getting tight even now! The song seems weird because, if you pay attention all the way through, it seems like she could be simultaneously addressing a lover and a parent, but what she's actually doing is capturing the bittersweetness of the past and the future. She hopes, as an adult, that her lover will love her honestly and fully, unconditionally as that past parent who held her on the beach as a child. (Or so I think). She asserts, almost with pride, that the wrong notes 'are part of me' and then asks, uncertainly, 'will you stay by my side?' Rather than answer this question, the song segues into an invitation: 'I'd like you to come with me -' before effectively fading to flashback, and then ends abruptly. We never know what happened next, and that only hooks me in deeper.

No version of Wrong Notes that I've found ends any differently. It's a mystery, and I would say that that neatly sums up Charlotte Hatherley's music - conveniently reflecting some well-known stereotypes of women, it seems mysterious and enigmatic/childlike and instinctive/poppy and superficial (delete as appropriate), but as in The Yellow Wallpaper (written by her namesake, a considerably more famous Charlotte!), seek and ye shall find. I certainly feel that beneath all the music, you can discern the traces of a real woman - frightened, hopeful, defiant, anxious, sexual, childlike, courageous, cautious and imaginative. It resounds with shapes and colours, she talks about a firebird, a komodo dragon, a ship, a garden... I don't know if she's a self-professed feminist, but she's said this:

I've got a wicked band assembled, I've got two girls in it which is good because that's one thing which I've realised - I don't have to do things I don't want to anymore, I'm never going to tour without having another girl so it's cool.

How awesome is that? Instead of engaging in 'exceptional woman syndrome'-type behaviour, after having been the only woman in an otherwise all-male band for about 10 years, she's actually supporting other women. 'Exceptional woman syndrome' is where women think that they don't need other women because (in the words of Shakesville), they buy into the contradictory BS that 'it’s a meritocracy, that the quality of our work will carry us to success. Because we are different. Better.' EWS leads to women who have made it through seriously toxic environments - whether the workplace or the family - attributing it to their own super-specialness and refusing to acknowledge their debt to their female predecessors, and/or, all too often, screwing over other women who follow in their footsteps. It's the basis of marriage in India even to this day (not just India), allowing mothers-in-law to make life hell for their daughters-in-law in the guise of teaching them how to behave. In its most toxic form, EWS provides the basis for 'exceptional' women to serve as patriarchal patsies, delighting sexist men and decrying egalitarian measures by effectively going 'Sexism? What sexism? I never experienced any in _______ (insert male-dominated field)' thus making life harder for women who have experienced sexism and are seeking some female solidarity. Sarah Palin's a good example of an Exceptional Woman, but you find them everywhere - the worst kinds of hypocrites.

While the press has no right to hound women like Amy Winehouse and Britney as it does (and I'm NOT implying that they deserve it in any way), CH is on the whole very un-celeb as she generally keeps attention off herself and entirely on the music, which I love. It's way more interesting. I have to say that AW's behaviour does annoy me a bit - I want her to start channelling her talent back into music, but unfortunately given that her music and it would seem, her sense of self revolves a great deal around her relationships with men, that's not likely to happen any time soon. By contrast, CH provides several examples of strong womanhood - in the video for I Want You To Know, she's a boxer and in Behave, a space pilot, whilst she's penned an ode to Kim Wilde and the song Paragon is about idolising a dynamic girl called Caroline. Grey Will Fade, the title track of the first album, is about GIRL LOVE - her comforting her beloved friend Fay - I mean, maybe she is supposed to be singing with a male voice, but from the tone of the lyrics, I don't see any evidence of it. Turns out she also said this:

"I want people to come to this tour and see me Jen and Charley playing guitar really fucking well and see that there are lots of girls out there who can do it. I really hope people and even girls in the audience can get inspired by that."

Do you love her yet? I'm falling in love all over again.

Dear Robert Fox,

Fuck you, you white supremacist, racism-qualifying, self-important, jumped-up FUCKER.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/14/martin-mcdonagh-race-row-broadway

Excuse me while I go figuratively break some things. Apparently now being black whilst being offended at 'artistic' racism against black people is being 'racially intolerant'?! WTF.

Posting will resume (sorta) when I clear up the spattered fragments of my brain.

Rape culture + pornification

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Libertarians and dumb shit

I really should know better at my age (and educational state) than to be wading in to a debate that looks like it could be BLOG BEEF in the making, buuuuuuut...

On Pickled Politics this eve, after strenuous charades and serving of food/washing/loading of dishwashers for about 20 people or so, I sees this.

Now, I guess I have to comment because:

a) my boyfriend is a white libertarian and
b) he's demonstrated this kind of frankly depressing ignorance before.

Though I would like to hope that since that evening, he's going to think a little bit before he does it again. I keep reminding him of it every now and again so that he doesn't get complacent, and he fact-checks me. It's a great partnership. :-D

I don't actually mind libertarians at all. Barring the ones who are actually just selfish, semi-deranged conservatives who use 'libertarian' to mean 'extremely bigoted and misanthropic conservative-in-disguise' (or Randies, as one might term them, since these are also usually the kind of libertarian who thinks that 'not leaving poor people to die' is a crime against their god, the free market), libertarians are OK. I was about to say: hey, I married one.

Um, anyway. Charlotte Gore is OK. I'm not sure that my linking to her is really all that... necessary, but yeah, there you go. I don't really read her or anything, but she doesn't seem to be totally clueless. I mean, she seems to understand what 'racism' is (for anyone who was wondering, racism = prejudice + power) better than most other libertarians I've encountered online. Barring my bf who, let's be honest, is something of a miracle. I would elaborate, but I don't want to give away his identity wantonly.

However, as I've said to him, I often can't help agreeing that libertarianism is for rich, white people, or in the parlance of this country, white middle-class people. The problem is that so many of them argue from this cloud cuckoo land vision, where the world is all a beautiful place and nobody needs help to get anywhere. I know that they're not stupid per se, they're just ignorantly idealistic white liberals. If you are white and middle-class, you have had both racial privilege and class privilege handed to you throughout your life. Racial privilege, for me, is the bigger issue, because it's a lot harder to lose than is class privilege. You can 'downsize,' take a less high-flying job, or be 'an old Etonian on the median wage,' as Devil's Kitchen claims to be. However, if you're non-white, you can't dye your skin - or your family - white. I can pass for white occasionally, but I feel a strong affinity to parts of Indian culture that just isn't there for some parts of English culture. Give me the Mahabharat over the Bible any day.

Which is where my gripe comes in:

OK. So, my class must be defined by my parents; Sunny's race is defined by his parents. I can no more help the income of my parents than Sunny can affect the race of his.

So, there is an equivalence: yes?

Firstly, as LeftOutside points out in this EXCELLENT post, DK totally misunderstood what Sunny was talking about when he said 'class war.' He also misunderstood the definition of 'class' being used.

Secondly: FAIL. As I mentioned above, you can change your economic classification (which is how I generally understand 'class' as well) but you can't dye yourself white! Not that that stops the skin-lightening industry!

This is where the cloud cuckoo land bit comes in:

Once again, we see how the Left prefers to label people by their differences—and why? So that human beings can be kept at each others' throats—through the generation of class envy, race hatred, religious differences. This is an old, old tactic which I call divide et impera—divide and rule—and I have written about it extensively.

It is better for people to be labelled, put into boxes and the differences between them emphasised—rather than uniting them in the realision that we are all human beings together—because that causes problems and tensions.

(All quotes from here).

Um, excuse me, but I am a non-white female. As in, I am one of them who is often figured as the step above the Ultimate Imaginary Victim in bigots' mythology of racism - the one-legged black lesbian, with the implication that I, like she, doesn't exist and that if I do, it doesn't really matter.

Last time I checked - EVERY time I have checked - it was either right-wingers or self-proclaimed 'liberals' who practised racism (quick Q: is 'mild' or 'subtle' racism, as opposed to 'race hatred' OK then?) and the demonisation of religious difference (i.e. if it's non-Judaeo-Christian and it's making a fuss - BAN IT!). The practice of 'divide and rule' was also famously used in India (and Africa) by the British, and oddly enough, none of them were particularly left-wing by any stretch of the imagination. Just ask the Imperial War Graves Commission... What was it the British colonial authorities in Nigeria said when it was suggested that descendants of Africans killed in WWI might want proper graves when they were 'civilised enough to appreciate them' in 200-300 years' time by the then-head of the IWGC (apparently a liberal man for his time)? 'No.'

Misguided lefties in the SWP and Respect have been known to ally with Islamists in a desperate and moronic 'marriage of convenience,' it is true. Still, I would like DK to show me as many properly non-racist right-wingers or libertarians, as are among the regulars on PP, at least. When the debate about libertarians has reared its ugly head between my partner and I, even he struggles to name more 'positive' libertarians than himself and DK (and perchance, Gore?) and he is the only libertarian I've encountered who even remotely understands how much of a handicap - psychological as well as otherwise - not being white is.

I actually kinda like DK, even though I don't read him particularly, or necessarily agree with his views. I mean, it's about as white/male privilege as you can get to know that you can go and have a huge angry-child tantrum on your blog and have scores of white men come to make consoling, pacifying noises because, as with almost everything else, white men think and act like they are the powerful majority (as opposed to just one group of people) on the web (and in political blogging, they sure are). I was particularly impressed by his wife showing up on PP to upbraid Sunny for not using better language than him - nice one, Bella! Do you think you could have a word with the hubby too, though? Thanks.* But dumb shit is dumb shit, and really, there's little excuse when the Net is at your fingertips.

*(Side note: Oh my God, she reads I Blame The Patriarchy too! But she spouts Latin at random! I think I might sort of hate-love her).

Now my legs are aching fit to fall off, so I'm-a haul my freezing self under the covers and hopefully have a crying-free night of sleep. BYE, my pretties!

At Last

Good grief, perhaps there should be a health warning against mixing your media. I've spent the whole day (more or less), and the last few weeks since the end of September, doing reading for my Master's. Today's reading has been a mixture of First World War Poetry, Mrs. Dalloway and an essay by Michèle Barratt - all on the theme of shell-shock. Just now, as I waited for my NEW LAPTOP (hurrah!) to come to life, I ceded to temptation. Having put Etta James's Best Of on my IPod, I allowed myself to play At Last (super-awesome version with clips from Funny Face on it) on my speakers...

... but what was this? As the music filtered deliciously through, I stiffened, feeling a sudden wave of frigidity shoot up my spine, and seize my nipples. My whole body was soon subsumed in this tingling cold as the lyrics soaked deep into my thoughts. Every nuance of her voice, her sentiments - the hope, the barely-restrained pleasure mingling with the violins' plaintiveness, all bound in a rough, caustic tenderness - irrigated my brain. The melancholy beneath her long wait had become my own. As the song hit me, I dimly felt a memory of The Libertarian scroll across my mind -

My heart was wrapped up in clovers
The night I looked at you*

and I was shivering, almost rooted to the spot. As Etta lingered to the close of the song, I realised my eyes were filled with tears. The next song began, but my body was still in its heightened state of chilled distress. I put At Last back on, and freed the tears that had gathered. After that, I returned (mostly) to normal. My temperature still seems to be unstable, though, and whilst listening back to the song on Youtube (trying to pinpoint the exact effect certain phrases had on me), I wept further.

While it can be embarrassing to admit to reactions like that, I don't feel it too much. It was a uniquely transcendental experience - and ironic to boot. Earlier today, I read an interview with Bill Bailey, in which he responded to the question 'Attitude to drugs?' with:

People try them, and then most people realise life experiences exceed the experience drugs give you.

To which I thought: 'Y'know Bill, I agree - in fact, being a drug-free AND alky-hawl-free zone too, I HEARTILY AGREE. However, why do I seem to be having so few 'life experiences' at the moment?'

Well, you get what you wish for. I couldn't help wondering if many of the Modernist writers and artists I read about had a similar reaction to Wagner - and what they would think of my reaction to Etta James. Would Theodor Adorno approve of her, I wondered. I decided that he would probably be unsure at first and then, once I described to him the implicit sense of narrowly-averted heartbreak and tragedy, the hint of a death richly merited 'at last' ('And here we are in heaven/ For you are mine/At last') and the overriding, persuasive magic of Etta's voice, he would have NO CHOICE but to agree. (For anyone who doesn't know what 'Modernism' is, or who Adorno is, or simply doesn't care - don't worry, I'm just being a saddo literary nerd).

The reasons for that sudden moment are likely to be as follows:

a) TOM has 'come around.'
b) I'm in love.
c) I was really looking forward to that song, since yesterday! I love romantic songs that are truly universal, or sung with loads of soul.
d) It's freezing.

As the song hit me, I dimly saw images of The Libertarian scroll across my mind ('Oh, yeah when you smile, you smile/Oh, and then the spell was cast'). Yesterday, I spent a whole 7 hours with The Libertarian - it was incredible. We did virtually nothing. We never do anything much of interest; it's not like my ex who shepherded me to gigs and exhibitions (and vice-versa) constantly. We do go out together, but we're very happy to sleep beside each other as well, and hug (yes, I know - stop vomiting). Given my state, there's been a suggestion of tense fractiousness whenever we debate - and a week or so ago, we narrowly avoided a smackdown over the issue of experiences of racism. This has made me especially careful to appreciate him for all that he is; a shockingly generous and tender soul who somehow manages to be sensitive, pragmatic and adorable all at once.

So, at 7 p.m. I gave up all pretence of doing my reading (the reason for going to his house) and climbed into his chair with him, to spend a whole hour hugging, kissing and talking. My family have been getting on my nerves a fair bit recently. My parents (my dad in particular) have had to do a lot of refurbishment work and as they are both pretty close to retirement age, it tires them out. I've been doing a little housework, as always, but work and a desire not to get drawn into the web that snatched my second-eldest sister makes me hold back from trying to do lots. Essentially, I haven't been hugely helpful, but I haven't been that bad either, and when my parents asked me to come and do some hoovering and cleaning, I did it without too much fuss.

However, what happens in instances like this is: my mother will complain constantly about having loads of work and 'no support.' My dad will mention (separately) every now and then about how tired he gets. My mother will step up her complaints. I arrived back from university about 8.00 p.m. last week, and because I hadn't really slept, sat on the sofa with my eyes shut briefly. My mother arrived and began angrily lambasting me for being tired, saying that she and my father were doing all that work at their age. However, being my mother, she was neither complaining of her workload, nor asserting her right to ask our help, nor saying I shouldn't be tired. No, it was a confused mess of the three, which culminated largely in an attack on me for having the nerve to be tired, with a sort of jeering undertone. I got up and went upstairs, refusing to be subject to her vindictive resentfulness and resolving not to come down again in a hurry.

Normally, in a non-premenstrual state, my mother's rage-fest would be easier to cope with. This, however, came in the wake of weeks of fear and feelings of inadequacy, laced with a sense of bitter disappointment and cynicism, at my course. I've learnt by this point not to invest too much hope, but TL assured me that I would find the people at Master's level more to my liking; more serious and mature. Throughout undergrad English, I bitched many a time about how many of the students there didn't really understand or appreciate the money that they were spending to study.

He wasn't wrong. Week 1 of the core course left me reeling in terror; everyone else seemed to be either a) obsessively knowledgeable of Modernism, or b) derangedly devoted to becoming thus, especially if they were a mature student. I was really hoping that the mature students might come through for me! Guilt set in - was I unappreciative of the course because I hadn't had to pay? At the last moment, a long-hoped-for miracle came through and I was awarded a bursary to cover the full cost of my fees. I started to feel certain that I wasn't worthy of the money, and that maybe I didn't deserve to be there, as everyone else clearly knew much more than I ever could. What was worse, I realised, was that I didn't actually like Modernism all that much from my brief encounters with it last year. It had been terrifyingly knotty, all T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, 'breakdown of language and form,' and obscurity. Did I deserve to be there?

After having a short period of emotional alienation from TL as a result of being absolutely unable to talk - for some reason, I could not talk to him at all - we fought and the release brought tears and awareness. The realisation of what each of us had nearly lost in the other propelled me back to full sanity and I gave my course a bit more opportunity to 'stick.' I chatted to some of the other women on my course; yes, they were nice enough. That week and the next brought new understanding: it wasn't because of their knowledge that the other students put me off. It was because history was repeating itself. At undergrad, there had been the deadly-serious (like myself, I guess) and the rest, with a few 'nice enoughs.' Now, the deadly-serious and the 'nice-enoughs' had come together - and I had changed substantially.

I have always been the sort of person who, by virtue of shyness and a natural tendency towards solitude, never makes friends instantly. I often find myself befriending one person, who is attached to others who are much cooler towards me, and vice versa. This happened all over again with one woman who was genuinely warm and friendly (R), but who appeared to be fast palling up with a more aloof, intelligent-yet-overly-brisk breadstick. Yet I didn't care - and why not? Was this because I'd reached that stage where I was tired of making the effort, tired of having to fight to be liked and appreciated, tired of playing the clown? Ye-es. Listening to the two chatting though, watching their camaraderie, it hit me hard and sudden what the real issue was.

They were regular students. To them, the MA was one of the most important things they were doing, or would ever do. It was to me, but I was uncomfortable about the way we were being rather unsubtly shoe-horned into PhD-prep. I loved the subject, yes, but... Even in Week 1 as two students tussled over time in Marx, I watched them under a throbbing head, aghast. What the fuck were they on about? Why the fuck were they getting so worked up? Couldn't they both be right? What was the fucking point?

During the induction day, six days previously, I had discovered that I was Best of the Web on Cif and persuaded a lecturer to let me use his Internet and check, very quickly, because I thought it was going to be taken down the next day (by which point, I wouldn't be able to see it with my own eyes as I was going to be out till 9 and then bedding down early for work the next morning). I assumed he knew about the Terence Kealey thing. He didn't; I explained. He commented that he didn't really get involved with that kind of thing (blogging etc.) because he couldn't handle the abuse (someone had left me a very unpleasant comment).

At the time, I thought nothing of it. Yet as the first three weeks sloped along, I suddenly and starkly recalled this incident, lit up against my general observations of the seminars and conversations with some of my other lecturers - and then I saw that I had been very blind and stupid. The department (and by extension, the world of English academia) was not the dry, self-contained hive it (and others) used to be - no, it had expanded, all right. It had expanded as students demanded their money's worth, to this level of curricular and extracurricular mixing, this new world of blurred boundaries that Kealey's 'satire' was meant to address...

... and there it stopped. I had always assumed that my lecturers were avidly interested in the 'real world,' that somehow they found time to follow the general thrust of current affairs beyond reviews sections and TV biographies. For some reason, I thought that they, like I, were always reflecting on what they discussed, on how to apply it to the real world, on what it all meant and mattered outside of literature and the seminar room. I was wrong.

Not only were my lecturers perfectly 'white middle-class,' I realised, but now, so too were my fellow students, most overwhelmingly. In our particular MA group, there was myself, a black student, a Japanese international student and 'Roz' who appeared to probably be of Pakistani or Bangladeshi background, but certainly wasn't trying to own it. When I mentioned this and the fact of being the only ethnic minority student in my other seminar group, TL demanded a population count and then returned the verdict that anyone else non-white and 'ethnic minorities would be overrepresented,' spectacularly missing the point.

None of them were, or even remotely seemed, particularly political. They didn't really need to be, not like I do. I recalled a conversation in which my parents had (inevitably) surfaced with a group of my peers, and the absolute gulf it created as always. R and I ended up conversing afterwards, and she tried to relate to me by discussing an ex-boyfriend of hers who was from a strict Greek background. I could not really talk about my situation properly, and the whole conversation brought to mind a half-wet beach. Something was missing. I could not understand what, or why, but something made me feel fundamentally unable to relate to these people. Not only unable, but also unwilling - alongside the general tendency of people in London to rapidly form cliques, and my own immense antipathy towards groups, something else was at work.

A 'teachable moment' with TL - the row about racism - helped me make some sense of it, as did a conversation with a long-unencountered acquaintance. TL protested that he did not like the way that I called him 'white middle-class' sometimes, but that he put it down to my being angry and TOM. I asked him why he didn't like it. He spluttered that it was because he couldn't help being that way, that I made it sound like some kind of accusation. He then went so far as to say 'it's like racism, really.' I had maintained a position of amused detachment, an ironic curiosity, while my innards broiled at his remarks. At that point, a world of rage cracked about my shoulders. I felt like Kali-Ma, towering, ready to bring about the destruction of solar systems with a hard, little smile.

'I cannot believe you said that,' I whispered, hurrying downstairs out of earshot, 'that is fucking appalling.' I tried to explain to him that racial privilege was poisoning his brain and that the pang he felt was what ethnic minority people feel constantly once they realise that they live within a racist system. He tried again to assert that my remarks were a form of racism.
'Racism? How is this racism?' He tried to 'explain.' I cut right to the heart: 'Did I say that you were inferior because you are white?'
I'd got him there. I repeated myself, for emphasis and to get through fully to him. 'No...'
'Well, how the fuck is that racism? Is there a concerted campaign - a campaign stretching over YEARS AND YEARS to portray white people as inferior, savage, backwards or effeminate by virtue merely of being white?'
As a historian (a very fine one at that), he could not of course assert that there ever was, or had been.
'I did not mention that you were white and middle-class because I have anything against whites (I wouldn't be dating you) or middle-class people (I'm probably middle-class myself). Did I say, implicitly or explicitly, that you were inferior, because you are white middle-class? NO. I mentioned it because you ARE white middle-class; as you said, you were born that way and I was trying to show you that you are a product of that.'

'But,' he was almost supplicant now, and I could see this coming, just like I'd seen the rest coming but couldn't believe it, 'I campaign against racism. I write on it; I write about honour-based violence and things like that, you know -'
'Yes,' I said, 'but just because you are not racist and campaign against racism, it doesn't mean you know how racism feels. It does NOT mean you understand the experience of racism. That is what so many ethnic minorities wish that white liberals of all stripes would understand. Not being racist and campaigning against racism, does not mean that you fully understand the experience that we go through.'
He had the nerve to ask me how much racism I'd experienced - I responded in as dignified a manner as I could, but I was angry about that and I let him know later on. That whole thing put me in mind of how rape victims still have to demonstrate evidence of some sort of physical struggle to be taken entirely seriously.

THAT is the huge, great sinking realisation that I have so often been working towards in these last two years of my life. The discussions I've read about unconscious racism within in the feminist community and silencing behaviour on a whole range of American feminist blogs, has given me the key to a whole new kind of awareness. I saw the full, shattering rawness with which interracial relationships can be so easily soured and destroyed. I understood more than ever why so many ethnic minority parents feel less than delighted about their children entering into interracial relationships or marriages.

More importantly, I understood why anti-racist feminists (and other campaigners) despair of overcoming the final hurdles in combating racism. Those white people who are 'on our side' don't always realise the harm they do, when they appropriate our experiences by trying to empathise without fully understanding the need to STFU and LISTEN, and/or when they react childishly and thoughtlessly to the awareness of their complicity in the racist system that they've never had to face before. What with that AND the newer delusions of 'majority victimhood' perpetuated by the likes of the BNP and far too many of our daily papers (I'm looking at you, Mail, Sun, Express, Telegraph and Standard... and London Lite and the Metro... and Sky News...), being able to reach full equality and acceptance seems painfully remote.

I was lucky in that I could predict my partner's responses and respond to him clearly - and lucky in that he's the type of guy who LISTENS when I need him to. (The type of guy whose love makes me cry to Etta James! Haha). I will probably post some more on this in time, but for now, my nose hurts and the memory of all this is greatly demoralising.


*Lyrics to At Last here.