recipes 4 radical queer friendship: golden milk smoothies

Sumi’s Golden Milk Smoothie

1 banana (fresh or frozen)

1 mango (fresh or frozen)

1 inch turmeric root (peeled) or ½ teaspoon turmeric (ground)

1 inch ginger (peeled) or ½ teaspoon ginger (ground)

dash of black pepper

dash of cinnamon (optional)

dash of cardamom (optional)

½ cup greek yogurt

1/3^rd cup almond milk

1/3^rd cup coconut milk

toss everything in a blender and blend till smooth. if working with a low-powered blender, first blend the turmeric and ginger root with the liquids (coconut milk, almond milk) and then add the other ingredients. add water if needed for preferred consistency. Experiment with different fruits, like 1 cup pineapple instead of 1 banana.

Bedtime golden milk:

1 cup milk (dairy or non-dairy, it’s your pref)

½ teaspoon ground turmeric

1 tsp coconut oil

1.5 tsp honey (add more for taste)

dash of black pepper

dash of cinnamon

dash of cardamom

dash of ginger powder or raw ginger slices

really I just use my fingers and pinch the different spices and oil into the milk as it heats up, mix it, let it simmer (try to avoid boiling the milk because this kills good stuff in it – but if you do it’s nbd), and check on if the bitterness of the turmeric has subsided (approx. 5-7 min). have a cup of this every night to keep your immunity up and help aid seasonal cold/flu/allergy symptoms.

"She is the laugh; I am the laughter."

"She is the laugh; I am the laughter."

The title of this blog post comes from the last pages of Beloved. When I read it I paused to try and identify a laugh from its laughter. I opened my mouth slightly to help with remembering. Not laughter as in funny, but laugh as in energy slipping from one ledge to another. Through Denver's (daughter) description of Sethe (her mother), Morrison took me to the place of my own Bengali kindred. I thought of my mother and father whose laughs live an extended life through me. Not laughter as in funny. This laugh is birthmark and a burden. And I wonder if this is the first of many times I will be reminded that I have little choice in my reflection yet am wholly responsible for it.

In 2011, I wrote that there lived a stunning leopard inside me that was preparing to leap. Today, while I'm visiting my parents and Durham for a few days, I think that leopard did leap but not in the sexy way I imagined it would. This morning I was involved in an argument with each of my folks, the irritation I felt toward them just too simultaneous. My dad is criticizing the meditation talk I am listening to, telling me to beware of extremism. He is having a conversation with himself. I am annoyed. My mom is telling him to be quiet and suggesting I be understanding of his belligerence. I am annoyed. Her comment is enough to tap me into a timeline of harmful and familiar reasoning. Later in the day she tells me that despite what British colonizers did, she is thankful they built railroad tracks in India. It sounds like when she says, despite my father's 'faults' (aka acts of violence), he is still a 'smart' man who has shown her many things in life. Imagine watching that hot, round thing in a pin ball machine knock itself into the smaller barricades a few times before falling through in the end. My spirit is swerving and bruising and falling through to the end. As I write I feel somewhat restored because this is a reminder of the dark, fertile things that move me towards feeling free. Amidst the meditation rant, my dad points outside the kitchen window and tells me his spirituality is rooted in the trees, earth, birds, and his connection to all other beings. I say Wow that's something we share. He laughs and my mom smiles and asks me if I think I was made from mud or from my mom and my dad. I laugh and that hot, round, bruised thing rises inside and wishes they would get away from me.

Transitioning from his rant, my father asks if we can eat breakfast at McDonald's together tomorrow. I tell him I don't want to spend time with him. He laughs and looks at me horribly when I say he acts disrespectfully and then wants to be friends. The day before, he laughs when telling me he believes my brother who says I'm not An Actual Gay but Mentally Gay. He smiles and searches for recognition in my face because he is the laugh; I am the laughter.

After a little more pin ball fighting occurs, I go to my old room, close the door, and start to cry. I wonder if I can change my bus ticket to tomorrow and debate whether they will drop me off at the station without too much drama. I am a few beats in when my spirit reminds me that this is my unsexy, growth moment. I pull my wet-nose, leopard body up from the bed. It takes a few more moments because the wallowing feels easy. In the meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests when the person who you love hurts you, that your 'mantra' can be, "Darling, I suffer. Please help." This lands on me. I consider if I am suffering and if the idea of her help feels good. I'm not sure but it sounds hopeful. I go to her and tell her I'm upset. I lean into the most sensitive part of me and her whole demeanor changes. There is a clearing and we speak calmly to each other about the car and dropping her off at work.

 my mom smizing in a pre-sumi world.

Dida, you my queer.

Dida, the air around you is a queer force. It slips and settles between white sari folds with the gold thread lining that only an ancestor like you can rock. Dida, ur queer twice removed and it lives an extended life through me. I never met you - like that - been in your house though, the one where you died. Not the one you had your first baby in at age 16 - that house where they didn’t let you move in till you were “of age” despite being married at age 11 (which tells me that they knew better but followed anti-girl customs anyway). Dida, did you suggest this vitiligo for me? Few understand for real that it’s special to me. Not because it’s a sanctioned thing, but because the body as an atlas (and not an apology) is a special way to meet the world. Dida, I can’t tell them what came first, the vitiligo, the queer, the girlhood, or the brown woman from that girlhood. So what I’m saying is you, Dida, are an origin that breathes through me. I was a young middle schooler when my dad (your son) told me during dinner that you had a child before the eleven others and that she died as a baby. I cried, said it wasn’t fair. I swoll up, my girlchild body a pond that took sadness and time and wove them in and out of each other. I cried a purposeful sadness and I think it may have been the first time I clearly remember yours’ coming through me. Dida, we never met so I guess it’s ‘safe’ to say queer is not a basis for whether we communicate or not bcuz I think the dead transcend the self.  So as the living, a way to love you is to move myself through us both. I don’t expect that you’ve been hover-crafting above me, watching as I went from goin bout my adolescent business, to grown and sexy Sumi. Yet you as a survivor, the girlchild and the mother of 12, are part of my queer creation story. Bcuz when I laugh, with my full self, it’s like I reach through the fire in my belly and pull us both into the moment with me. You’re in my dykeness, the way I take up space as a brown woman, the way desi sisterhood is still powerful. We never met yet you’re in the prism of my life, the gruffness with which I put on my pants when I’m running late, yet the way I lay naked on my bed after shower and do my ceiling fan meditation. You in my mutiny, my gurl gang tendencies, and the way I know another world where we’re all full, is possible. Dida, your son says I’m not gay just “mentally gay,” which lets you and I share a smirk since it was his mama who showed me the ropes.  We waking up time Dida, because the girl you and 24 year old me are comrades, while the 60 year old you planted seeds in the 13 year old me to fight like hell for living. Dida, take this poem as my sound, the one made when an elder breathes through me, and so I speak.

(image of both my Didas. Protiva, my dad's mom on the left, is who I'm writing to.)

Sula

I finished reading Sula by Toni Morrison earlier this week. I had come down with a cold and had several days with my snot rags to read the book. I wanted to post some quotes for y'all here but tbh I just read the book...no notes, no underlining. I just got to sit with it and have its lush ass literary intimacy keep me there and keep me reading. It ended up undoing me more than I could it, anyway. I hope to read Sula several more times in life. Toni Morrison's writings...I just can't. If you don't know about it, please read one of her books! I know they had us read her work in high school but it's a different experience as a coloured desi womin in my early 20s to read her novels. 

 

  image via luminarium  

          

image via blackmanonthemoon

In the foreword of Sula, Toni Morrison writes: 

"How does a reader of any race situate herself or himself in order to approach the world of a black writer? Won't there always be apprehension about what may be revealed, exposed about the reader?"

Reading this I heard Toni Morrison return the gaze @ white supremacy, particularly within Amerikkkan literature. She discusses how her work and that of other Black writers are asked to represent "whether 'Black people are--or are not--like this'." Toni Morrison then says she "again, rooted the narrative in a landscape already tainted by the fact that it existed." You already know. And further she's like, aren't y'all asses afraid that your response to reading this might expose the racism and patriarchal whiteness you keep so close kempt? I mean ask a question, really.

I should mention that these are all quotes from the foreword. Forewords, at least in The Bluest Eye and Sula, are crucial.

 This is the last paragraph from the foreword of Sula:

"Outlaw women are fascinating--not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men. In much literature a woman's escape from male rule led to regret, misery, if not complete disaster. In Sula I wanted to explore the consequences of what that escape might be, on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship. In 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste."

And of course, my bisexual hypothesis for the book is that Sula and Nel become lovers.

how to sprout a sumi bean

Welcome to the 2014 comeback of my blog. I'm going to call this my seed-to->SPROUT ;) because I feel the buzz to write after a long time. 

When I was age 13, a brown two-tone girlchild with the door locked, in my feelings because of what I today know is called verbal abuse, I would diary so I could capture my level of awareness at that moment. These were my first notes to self. I knew eventually years would pass and I did not want to risk the possibility of an older me being insensitive to the intelligences of 13 year old gurl me. I was like, listen, you might be a parent one day and I'm writing this so you know better about them than your family knows about you. I was truly on some next level woc time machine shit. I am impressed with lil sumi for being so down for gurl smarts, remembering, and the next generation.  

 image via starteatingreal

On that tip: I'm sensing that the time is now to write me, for me, by me, again. I want to write about building self-confidence&self-worth at age 23 as a bisexual desi womyn. I am an upper caste desi womyn (kshatriya). Thenmozhi Soundararajan writes in her piece, The Black Indians (required reading on caste), "The Indian diaspora thrives on caste because it is the atom that animates the molecule of their existence." Yes, this shit goes really deep and is hardly ever acknowledged by Brahmin and other upper caste writers. This is basically like throwing a sheet over a hippo and going about your business pretending said hippo ain't there. BTW you are the hippo, so that is very confusing also. Something that is very powerful and significant is the connection between Black feminists and Dalit feminists. I first learned of this connection on Problem Chylde's blog where they quote an interview with Ruth Manorama:

“I was looking at why these Black women were organizing themselves differently. Why were they separate? Then, I understood the racist notions of purity and pollution that operates there [US]. Just like our situation, the Black women don’t have leadership in the mainstream women’s movement. The White women were not going to solve the problems of Black women…They not only wrote about the racist inequality, but they spoke about the class struggle, they outlined the economic oppression, the absence of land and resources. There are so many connections between the Dalits and the Blacks.”

Caste, a form of anti-blackness, as she says, is a system where a persons' value is based on a racist hierarchy of purity and pollution. Upper caste hindu identity as enlightened ass bharatnatyam dancin bearers of "indian culture" is built on the backs of lower caste, dalit and adivasi peoples. It is a deeply psychological racism (it exists in the mind) that does not solely rely on skin tone. To fellow desi sisters and queers who are reading this, why do you think our people assimilate like a muthafucka once they reach the West? Why they think they're better than Black and Latin@ peoples? Why they believe in the US Government??? Unpacking and resisting caste as an upper caste bengali desi is a responsibility. It is a part of my journey in finding self-worth.

To be continued.

Sometimes I am like

'Okay these are my tasks.' These are the things. I want to get them done and so maybe I will and then I'll get to feel like one of those productive types. Acha fine. But then I find myself doing these things in exactly the most irresponsible order. For instance, last Sunday I was in the shower remembering how I wanted to clean the bathroom and finish painting the walls in my room. I am inside the shower, thinking about how I should have done these household tasks first and instead now it is like oof. Even if you were ambitious enough to do three things today (shower, clean, paint) it won't count one hundred percent because you ended up doing it in this faltu order. I get out of the shower, lay on the bed and stare at the ceiling fan for 20 minutes because this is generally what I do and because I do not like to move fast after shower. I realize that my habits all together are not that productive and then what is a habit anyway. Then I do some stream of consciousness about how my inability to do things right and make my meals cute-looking, accessorizing with bread etc have really shaped my character and perhaps how logically deprived those who do not often get to experience loss of productivity really are i.e. How to Let Yourself Feel Better in five seconds or less. Some gain from what they see as self-improvement and others gain from playing handgames with other peoples' illustrious stereotype of themselves(aka shittin on your whole life, amirite?!). Anyway, the point is not for me to be a rudegurl about people who like to think they have their shit together. If you like having your shit together and champion remembering to brush your teeth AFTER you drink orange juice then... go from me because you don't exist. Also why. Just generally in all things why. More specifically.... Why has this blog post been able to go on for so long? Why haven't I mentioned that I'm a brown lady with some brown missing?? Isn't that the only reason we read your poorly designed blog anyway #vitiligopoetry????

Basically I plan on blogging more regularly and less about laundry detergent or whatever this post was about in the near futch. It's also been brought to my attention that I might want to define what a [popsicle] piccolo is before some hip new yorker overhears and creates a whatshouldwecallmepiccolo tumblr and my one job prospect is ruined. To begin, I leave you with a piccolo of the day:

stolen from here

'jaggery pot! i ate sugar, you ate snot.'

Hiiiiiii and welcome my blog readers!!!! I hope that you are enjoying your visits to my tropsicle slime machine and including it in all your gossips which is the most dubious honor I could ask for. I don't know why I have a tendency to begin my posts as if I'm receiving a Grammy aka Teen Choice Award for Best Eyes aka Ring Pop (?) but helloos to you and thank gad for all the oneness but most importantly for making me feel like a number 1. I figure that certain readers might feel cheated during their past visits here because this is suppose to be a time machine which to some implies serious boot strappy mechanics, nuts n bolts etc but for some reason after you read my blog you feel like you haven't gone much of anywhere except maybe to a shady popsicle stand where you found a dead fly in your ice cream..................and ate it. I'm unsurprised to say that I've created a highly neglected, confusingly sequenced archive of my purrsonal poisonals here. Also Why did you eat that fly? "I write emotional algebra," wrote Anais Nin which is a lovely quote of hers I found on some website's compilation of Anais Nin quotes. I don't really know shit about Anais Nin except that her sun sign is in Pisces and I also don't think I write anything as mastered or meticulous as emotional algebra, but more like non-bra wearing emotions written through the imagined inflection of a platypus. Point beez, whomever you are, maybe you'll leave a comment or something so I can figure out if you are from the federal government checking up on whether I am of good character or mostly not. 

Mooing on, this blog post title is from my mom who recounted this lil jokesie from her tender youths in Madras. It goes:

 "Jaggery pot!" 
("what?") 
"I ate sugar, you ate snot!"

This is something that my mom would say when she was a kiddo but I find more enjoyment from her saying it to me as a grownperson. Isn't it just? Pot and snot rhyme so nicely to say something so unnecessary. Also my mom talking about snot is probably one of the more precarious things to happen in months so I totes had to give yougaiz an update #jelous? 

Another update is that I moved last week!!!! To New Orleans yougaiz. And I have plenty to say about that but for now I just want to send a lot of love to my peeps in the places I don't live anymore - specifically those I know from North Carolina and Hyderabad. Maybe it's my new job that's inviting all these Mr. Roger's neighborhood sensations but I'm recognizing the value of those communities by moving to this city where I came knowing practically no one. And while it's really pretty exciting to have the scope of my daily encounters feel like multiple first dates...... I guess I miss the companionship ? And with that conclusion I've literally turned into a cornish hen. What I mean to say is that there's a lot of unrecognized jaggery-pot-sugar-snot there and that magnificence has always been with us even when it was just the 50 millioneth pine tree I came across.

To finish, here is a picture of my previous birthday cuteness to commemorate the slightly aged, sappy cuteness that I feel today: