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.