... 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.
Your answer was illiberal
As I clicked 'post comment,' it occurred to me that I was perhaps using my race (or rather, my religion and the implication of my race) as a weapon. Is it fair that non-whiteys like me are tricking these morons into showing themselves up as the prejudiced fuck-cunts they are? I mean, this fellow was trying to catch me out in the crime of being middle-class. However, I caught him out in the process of being an entitled motherfuck.
Then, the thought settled in my mind like a peaceful pigeon. Sites like Pandagon have had discussions on online racism before, and people on there were mentioning the fact that commenters' attitudes to them (not necessarily on Pandagon) changed visibly once they revealed themselves to be non-white. Someone may have remarked on how white dudes, liberal and otherwise, try to perpetuate the 'real world' power structure online by assuming (with typical entitled ignorance) that everyone they engage with is a white (middle-class, but not always) male.
In the light of that, I say we non-whiteys use this to our advantage. If people want to rant their prejudices, use the power of intersectionality against them. Any attempt to discuss racism in the British public sphere that appears on Cif, is usually met with some bollocks along the lines of 'this is what happens when identity politics gets taken too far.' The posters saying this almost always claim to be white working-class males.
Now I find this laughable. Fuck you, you hypocrites. Sunny wrote this marvellously sensible piece a while back, from which I must quote:
I think this is important. I can't help wondering if, with the tireless work of anti-racist campaigners, people have realised that certain prejudices are more 'acceptable' than others. It's OK to wantonly abuse people if they're middle-class. Their class placing outweighs their gender or ethnicity. Now, how fucking stupid is that?
I'm not calling for some free pass on anyone who sounds 'middle-class', but the fact is that people shouldn't get away with using that kind of knee-jerk stereotyping. Are all people who are middle-class exactly the same? Or, let's rephrase: are all working-class people exactly the same? Are they all benefit-scrounging, early-motherhood-reaching white trash chavs, or overly-fertile Somalis? Obviously not - but then again, the only 'middle-class' people who suggest that are the likes of the tabloids as well as the Telegraph and probably to some extent the Times as well.
Putting aside the fact that a lot of these so-called 'working-class' white males probably aren't (I mean, people on the right and left have made much of the BNP's attempt to court this particular demographic, but Nick Griffin's hardly salt of the earth, is he?), times have changed. The stupid class stereotyping that people fling around says a lot about them. In many ways, they remind me of first-generation Asian immigrants desperately trying to force certain values on their children because 'that's our culture.'
Groupthink - whether it's a group of conservative elderly Asians or the 'white working class' - is dangerous. I can't help suspecting that a lot of it is basically the same desperate attempt to project unity that you see in all oppressed groups. Still, I can't really forgive it. All working class people are individuals, just like everyone else. Same with middle-class people. I am not going to be ashamed of the fact that my parents came here and have worked their asses off for 30-odd years to allow us to lead a better life than we would've had in India.
Anyone who tries to tell me that I'm 'middle-class'; what the fuck are you talking about? Seriously, what do people even mean when they say things like that? Our class distinctions are highly outdated now - 'working-class' usually seems to mean 'poor.' I want to know what is behind the flinging about of this accusation, because really, for the most part I and other non-white people (even if we're considered as 'middle-class') are not holding the white working classes back. It's mostly the white middle classes that are doing that, thank you. Who writes for the tabloids and right-wing 'quality papers' that routinely demonise white-working class people? Gosh, there are so many non-white BBC senior execs, you can't move for them! Let's not even start on those City banks, those elite Oxford and Cambridge and public-school associations that heave with non-white faces...
I'm tired now, so I'm going to stop this particular rant here (the effort of not screaming while my mother criticised me at length during a walk just before this post - I believe it was for about 20 minutes running or so - was majorly knackering). Sam Leith had an article a while back which was slightly irritating - in an inevitably knee-jerk way - but once I got over the gut instinct, I really couldn't help agreeing with a lot of it.
He's got a point, and you know it!
In other, non-ranting news, I am doing my utmost best to put into practice a technique that the counsellor told me, of 'feeding back' to my mother when she victim-blames. Unfortunately, just as I thought I might've got the hang of it, my mother has moved to attacks on me instead. These are somewhat harder to deal with, as you might expect.
However, I realised two things about my mother: part of what makes her (and my other family members') attacks so effective are two things. Firstly, that she doesn't actually do them in an unreasonable or overly harsh tone of voice. I clocked this like a lightning bolt whilst describing one incident to The Libertarian on the phone. Suddenly, I thought 'Hang on - she never actually sounds like this when she's speaking to me. She sounds almost... normal. I parody her, but she's far more subtle than I've been giving her credit for.' Secondly, they come out of nowhere.
Textbook example: The other day, while waiting for a friend to arrive at the station near my house so that we could go collect her, I sat and watched the end of an old Bollywood film. One character was fat, but it looked odd, as if he had maybe padded out his middle instead of real weight. Without really thinking, I began aloud: 'Wow, he's really fat, but -'
'... but it doesn't look real'. Before I could finish, my mum suddenly proclaimed: 'You are really fat!' She sort of prod-pushed my arm and smacked my thigh, going 'Look! Look at you, you're all thhul thhul! I'm worried about you, you know. You're young, you should be slim.' I don't remember exactly what she said after that, because I was too busy reeeeling. 'You need to start watching what you eat,' she said. 'I know you go to the gym, but maybe you're not doing the right exercises? You need to do something to make your stomach smaller.' I asked her what I ate that was so bad that I needed to cut it out, and she said 'Well, I don't know, but...' I had to resist the urge to ask her if it wouldn't be prescient to just stop eating altogether.
The day after, I got up in the evening after a nap, with a headache. My sister's divorce was being discussed in the kitchen. I kept myself pretty much out of the way, coming in and out of the kitchen. Then, some devil impulse made me drift towards my mum who was standing in a corner and turn my back, so that I was leaning against her. She put her arms around me - and grabbed my stomach. 'See?' she said. I disengaged myself immediately and left the room.
Today, she went on at me about the need to have the life skill of dressing up for parties so that people who I would hate anyway, don't think that I'm stupid and prevent their sons from marrying me. She compared me unfavourably with my cousin YET AGAIN, saying that I need to learn to get all saji-baji the way she does for weddings. Spending the whole week/day shopping for said event/deciding what to wear/getting ready as if for a catwalk show is, according to my parents 'a life skill.' My mum eased the blow, though, by saying that my brother and I were 'simple' and 'naive'. Basically, it's not my fault I'm inept and unkempt - it's just my nature! Hooray! My father told me that I needed to 'be a good cook' and 'cook for lots of people.' Somehow, I didn't knife him.
UPDATE: GO FORTH AND COMMENT ON THE LIBCON THREAD! Despite my explaining that my vegetarianism is a result of growing up Sikh, the guy is too thick to process it. I ended by saying:
P.S.: Read this, it's BRILLIANT! Malky Muscular satirizes the whole Nick Cohen & Clive James Vs Western feminists foolishness. MM, I love you. Also, this post 'What Would We Do Without White Privilege?' over at Womanist Musings is THE WIN.