Archive for category Immigration and Diaspora
“And may all your Christmases be white…”
Posted by Nav in ethnicaisle, Immigration and Diaspora on December 19, 2011
Christmas is the one time of the year that my family does what people on TV do. Mad rushing to get presents? Check. Grand Christmas feast with a turkey and all the trimmings? Check. Indulging in icewine and gorgonzola in front of the fire like they do on those Food TV specials? Super-gluttonous, you-best-believe-it check. Yeah, when it comes to late December, we are the Christmasiest Punjabis this side of a… Gurdwara at the North Pole? Yeah, I don’t really know how to finish that.
It’s precisely that mirroring of what’s “out there” and what happens in our home that has endeared Christmas to me. Though I love Christmas for a whole slew of reasons (not the least of which is the burst of colour at the grayest, darkest time of year) part of it is definitely because it’s then that my life most resembles what I see in that odd thing we call “public space”.
That’s a weirdly conformist, assimilationist thing to say, I know. But when you’re a minority, much of the day-to-day ritual and tenor of your life is something you don’t really see reflected back at you. The little things that made up my life—the rustle of saris and salwar kameez; the sights and smells of chapatis being made; the mundane ordinariness of bi-culturalism—were always missing from popular culture. There was never that comforting feeling of watching TV and thinking “oh, right, I’m just like these people”. What was private and what was public just never seemed to quite match up
It’s no coincidence, then, that my parents started celebrating Christmas for precisely those reasons. What, after all, is assimilation other than a desire to make public and private one and the same? So we did and still do Christmas very British/Canadian style, just like they do on TV; it’s all decorated trees, cheese and crackers, and ole’ Bing on the stereo. If during January to November we mostly live life in our own hybrid, bi-cultural way, then in December it’s Whitey McWhitetown in the Alang household.
We form our identities in the back and forth between public and private. Much of the time, there’s a pleasure in the ways those things don’t match up, particularly when you’re privileged enough to be able to move back and forth between cultures like it ain’t no thing. But in as much as British and Canadian tradition is part of my life and identity (i.e. a lot), sometimes it’s nice to uncritically embrace that side of things, even if it is just one month a year. It’s almost like sometimes you need relief from not seeing your own life reflected in popular culture, and you just want to take a break. And while there’s something undeniably great about hybridity or celebrating festivals like Diwali, it’s occasionally nice to claim “Western” culture as your own, and simply kick back and have a white Christmas.
Questions about Russell Peters
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading, Immigration and Diaspora on November 29, 2011
I’ve never felt as ambivalent about a comic as I have Russell Peters. Mainly, I’m just unsure what his humour about accents and ethnicity really does. On the one hand, you have this sort of view, articulated by Professor Amardeep Singh:
At his best, Russell Peters airs out some intra-community dirty laundry. He plays with the mixture of embarrassment and pride that tends to circulate amongst members of various ethnic groups, especially immigrant ethnic groups. While many people might feel isolated within a particular ethnic niche, Russell Peters manages to draw people out, and create a certain amount of cross-ethnic solidarity.
But sometimes, I can’t help but think Peters never feels what Dave Chappelle must have felt looking at white people laughing at his jokes i.e. “wait, is this ‘laughing with’ or ‘laughing at’? This is creepy.”
I’ve never been sure if Peters’ humour works to undercut or reinforce prejudice. Or maybe it’s both? I have no idea. So, instead, here are some questions in the hopes someone could provide some clarity?
- What exactly is funny about accents? Why is it funny to hear otherwise, uh, “normal” (i.e. familiar) words pronounced in a different fashion?
- We’d probably get creeped out if a white comic were to imitate a “Chinese” accent – but we seem to be okay with Peters doing it. How come? Also, does that okayness work differently depending on who’s laughing?
- What are accents used to signify in humour? When Raj from Big Bang Theory does the classic “says a typical American phrase in an Indian accent” joke (“oh vow, that is awe-some, dood), we know that the humour works through the unexpected. But what does the fact that we don’t expect contemporary slang out of the mouth of an immigrant say/mean etc.?
- At what point does an accent go from being “haha, they don’t really get the language” (Indian, Chinese etc.) to “haha, their version of the language sounds really different from mine” (Scottish, Australian etc.)?
- Similarly, when does an accent go from being “different”, “bad” etc. to being desired or sexy? This is about more than race, too – Stephen Colbert consciously dropped his Southern accent because he felt it had become a marker of stupidity.
- Is there a difference between 2nd generation immigrants like Peters doing accents, versus a 1st gen immigrant like Papa CJ? Is this a “I was born here” vs. a “fresh off the boat” thing?
All I guess I’m saying is that I occasionally find myself creeped out by Peters’ humour. Isn’t it just reinforcing the dichotomy between normal and abnormal, native and foreigner? But, I often find myself laughing at it, too. Like, a lot. And how many times in my life have I used an Indian accent to crack a joke?
So… internalized racism? It’s just a joke, get over it, Nav? It’s a self-reflexive invocation of difference and therefore its inherent irony is a form of critique?
Help me out friends!
In Defence of Minority Homophobes. (Um, Not Really. But Sorta.)
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Immigration and Diaspora on June 25, 2011
The decline of colonialism and eurocentrism in the 20th century stemmed largely from two, mutually compatible ideas: first, that all humans are equally deserving of basic human rights; and second, that there is no objective scale by which you can determine the worth of cultures or cultural practices.
But while these two concepts formed the basis for many of the great moral victories of the past hundred years or so, there is still an unease lurking behind them. After all, one says “underneath, we’re all fundamentally the same”, while the other says, “hold on now – actually, we all have different ways of seeing things.” And it’s this discomfiture between what is shared and what is culturally specific that is the source of a lot of the tension within modern multiculturalism.
To get to a point where we could talk about ‘respecting difference’ at all wasn’t easy, of course. Much of it began when people started realizing that it wasn’t necessarily true that “west is best”. Despite being told for decades or centuries that their cultures were inferior, barbaric and backwards, people across the world began to ask themselves: why is my stuff considered not as good simply because it’s judged by Western standards?
It’s a phenomenon that continues today. Western understandings of individualism, familial responsibility etc. often dominate multicultural discourse, even among minorities themselves. Though a bit oblique, it seems worth pointing out that, as I type this, spell check recognizes the word ‘westernized’ but not ‘easternized’. Historically, for a myriad of economic and social reasons, cultural change has largely been framed as a one way movement from East toward West. And it’s something that many of us still fight against, as we try and carve out change according to a different, if fluid, set of cultural standards.
All of which is to say the following: when you’re a minority immigrant living in the west, particularly a first generation one, there’s a good chance you’ve expended a lot of energy defending the idea that your culture, identity and beliefs should be understood and respected on their own terms and in their own context. You feel this every time you hear someone ask whether one’s parents are “traditional”, or you read the comments under a story about arranged marriage, the hijab or any other number of topics.
But what, you may ask, has any of this got to do with Pride, gay rights or homophobia? Well, I guess it’s about this: What do you do when different, historical expressions of oppression bump up against one another? What do you do when the need to respect someone’s culture bumps up against the need to protect gay rights? Well, I have precisely no idea. But here’s what I do know: in a day-to-day context, it is impossible to entirely extricate the historical devaluing of non-Western cultures from condemnations of homophobia as un-Canadian, backward, or wrong. That is an uncomfortable truth – and do note where the emphasis in that sentence was – but it remains a truth nonetheless.
So here’s all I really mean to say. For a lot of immigrants in Toronto, including many I know, when someone tells them their homophobia is stupid and barbaric, they feel, as they have so many times throughout history, that their identities are being denigrated, dismissed or ignored. It sets up a dynamic of confrontation in which the issue, instead of being about all of us having the same rights, starts to feel as if one group is being prioritized over another. That there are numerous logical contradictions at the core of the discomfort – that you cannot have your rights unless you also accept the rights of others; or that, of course, it is often people within visible minority communities who are fighting for gay rights – is, I’d argue, only one part of the weird, messy equation here.
Yes surely, basic rights are the most important part of the dynamic, and are what we must cling to as the ultimate principle. Years of the complexity of pluralist democracy have taught us that, at the end of the day, there are certain ideals of equality we have to adhere to, even when they override ideals of multiculturalism. And no, no-one is suggesting that upon hearing the word “fag” or “dyke” yelled at you in the street, you get into a calm, rational discussion about sexual identity, patriarchy and cultural difference.
But at its end, this is about strategy and rhetoric. And here’s why I think yelling “stupid bigot!” at immigrant homophobes is bad as strategy. During the recent historic vote in the New York legislature, numerous affirmative voters claimed it was the religious protections in the 2011 bill that made them change their minds. That, particularly to a Canadian, sounded a bit off – maybe even distasteful. But politics isn’t about achieving what you want; it’s about as getting as close to it as you can given the situation at hand. It’s about dealing with the inevitability of history’s crushing weight pressing down upon you. In the New York vote, that weight was the deep ties between American political discourse and religious conservativism. In Canada’s battle against homophobia, it is often the tenuous balance between a history of eurocentrism and the unequivocal need to protect gay rights.
And if that means softening our discourse to those who disagree with us because we are mindful of both the legacy of colonialism and homophobia – then so be it.
This post is part of the Ethnic Aisle, a blog about issues of race, ethnicity and culture in the GTA. This post reflects the opinion of its author and not the Ethnic Aisle or its other participants.
“Like Walking Through Cobwebs”
Posted by Nav in Immigration and Diaspora, Pop Culture on August 6, 2010
Today on Twitter, a couple of people I follow had a brief conversation about polyamory. It was intriguing, in part because it was tinged with the ambivalence that can often characterize some aspects of modern feminism. Like the relationship towards traditional ideals of femininity, it’s hard to both disavow the structures that produced something – whether sun dresses or monogamy – when those same structures were part of the cultural milieu in which one was raised. To wit, you can be a feminist woman and yet still ‘not feel like yourself’ wearing men’s clothing; you can believe in polyamory and still get wigged out by it.
Polyamory represents an alternative to the social and material practice of monogamy. But rather than only being a different lifestyle, it is also part of a historical moment. The effects and causes of feminism – which is to say the combination of activism and socio-economic change like, for example, women working during World War II – have opened up space for a change in the social organization of sexual relationships. It’s not so much that the notion of polyamory never existed before as much as the social and material conditions for its practice were never very, um, favourable. That we exist in an era of ‘sexual liberation’, feminism, secularism, female economic independence etc. has made the option of polyamory a reality.
At the same time, what was clear during this conversation was the conflictedness that polyamory can introduce. We still live in an age when sexual fidelity and morality are linked. Additionally, there is, I’ve heard, some small amount of discourse committed to celebrating the notion of the lifelong love, ‘the one’ and monogamous marriage as the ultimate goal. What’s more, there are still the psychological impacts of polyamory: of not only the possibility of external, social censure, but a kind of internal punishment too, one that stems from directly contravening one of the core principles around which goodness, the good life and morality is centered.
So, naturally, you can see why I thought of the hijab.
This is an argument I’ve had floating in my mind for some time. In much the same way that polyamory is a sorta’ ‘edgy’ rejection of established social norms that carries with it both external social consequences and also psychological ones that come from flaunting standards, so too is the choice of a Muslim woman to uncover her hair.
I say this because, so often, the hijab vs. no-hijab debate is constructed in terms of freedom and personal liberty vs. repression and misogyny, as if all someone wearing a hijab must do is simply see the light, peel off her headdress and step into the future. But it so often misses that, like choosing to be polyamorous, it is a decision that removes one from – and places one against – an entire network of socio-cultural beliefs. It is not a single act or a solitary moment, but an ongoing reconfiguration of your relationship to a set of structures and practices that have not simply ‘governed your behaviour’, but constituted your identity. It is not about throwing off shackles, but instead, choosing to let your skin be chafed by a new pair.
But making matters even more complicated is the inextricability of rejecting of what are often called ‘traditional beliefs, and the accusation of becoming westernized. In the contemporary moment, articulating something like ‘Eastern’ (or, more specifically, Iraqi or Pakistani) feminism is essentially impossible to do outside of some kind of discourse in which change is a movement from East to West. As Fanon notes, history has been constructed such that the East is the past of a timeline on which the West is forever the present and the future. Or, to put it in slightly more contemporary terms, Microsoft Word recognizes the word ‘westernized’ but not ‘easternized’. That is not a viable option. It does not ‘exist’.
To take off the hijab, then, is always read as the inevitable movement toward the telos of western, individual liberty. But if one is concerned with a kind of ‘fidelity’ to an identity that is not simply about enabling or submitting to a neat East/West dichotomy – that one either participates in ‘traditional beliefs’* or assimilates to a set of western values – this presents a problem. Suddenly, your lack of faithfulness hurts not only those around you, but you yourself hurt too. You have betrayed something by becoming someone who cannot stick to one thing and one system. You have become a floating mark in a system that cannot locate you adequately because you are no longer recognizable by its most treasured precepts, ideas that form the very structural basis of social relations. You have sidestepped the control of female sexuality. You no longer makes sense within the ways of speaking about the individual or the woman or faithfulness because your actions contravene accepted truths.
What you do know though, is that with each step forward, the ‘fine meshes of power’ tug at you ever so slightly. They drag. They weigh. So that, as if walking through a stream of cobwebs, you are constantly reminded of your choice: to exist just on the edges of the world that made you as it keeps trying to pull you in.
On the History of Cha
Posted by Nav in Immigration and Diaspora on April 21, 2010
Cha (in Panjabi) or Chai (in Hindi) = Tea*
Courtesy of Flickr user this lyre lark under a CC license.
When you grow up as an immigrant family in Thatcherite England, you develop certain myths about the past in order to reclaim your sense of self. One that my father always told me was that, upon arriving in India, the English would boil tea leaves, throw out the water and eat the leaves.
It turned out to be totally false.
The English actually drank tea before they arrived in India. The only reason tea became so massively popular in India is that the Raj started cultivating the plant so they wouldn’t have to rely on China for their morning cuppa. But it is now an almost fundamental part of Indian life, one of the few things you could say is shared across the massive cultural divides of the country (though coffee, I hear, is just as popular in the South).
Anyway – this is all to point you to a lovely history of tea in India that outlines how cha became woven into the fabric of India. It also has some great pics of early tea ads – some of which are a little eyebrow-raising.
*White people, you know I love you – but every time I hear you say ‘chai tea’, a small part of me wants to smack you. Yes, you’re right, it’s grossly unfair and even a little condescending. Still. I just wanted you to know.
P.S. Oh – what has come to be known as chai tea in the west is sometimes called masala chai in India (masala = a mix of spices)
The Trouble Translating Sound
Posted by Nav in Immigration and Diaspora, Pop Culture on February 16, 2010
“Translation is treason.” – Old Italian proverb.
Like so many other 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, over the past few years I have made various half-hearted attempts at learning my parents’ native tongue – which, in my case, is Punjabi.
No, wait: maybe I should type ‘Panjabi’.
Which is correct? No-one knows. Or, at the very least, nobody agrees. See, in the specific instance of P… – well, that language from Northwestern India and Eastern Pakistan – there is no explicit vowel between the the ‘p’ and ‘n’ sounds in the name of the language. It’s implied. In fact, probably the best way to type the word in English letters would be “P’njabi”. I think.
Which, when you’re slightly OCD about rules in language, is awesome. More to the point, it means that when we are called upon to translate how words sound, most of us are totally at a loss.
Why the confusion? Well, unless you count obscure and difficult to learn phonetic alphabets, there is no easy yet systematized set of rules that state clearly which letters in the latin alphabet signify which sounds in non-latinate languages. And as we see increasingly more examples of linguistic and cultural overlap, where learning languages and translation across cultural lines is a necessity, this feels like a problem that needs solving – ’cause what we have right now is a mess of inconsistency.
Bollywood is great for examples of this. In the word ‘kuch’ in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the ‘u’ stands for a short ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘look’. Yet, in the song “Ishq Samunder” the ‘u’ signifies the same vowel sound as in ‘hut’. Similarly, the ‘a’ in Samunder is pronounced like the a in ‘ago’, while in ‘gham’ in Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham, the ‘a’ stands for a long ‘ah’ sound like in ‘car. Oh, settle in – we’re just getting started.
Sometimes this long ‘ah’ sound goes by a single ‘a’, but at other times it is indicated by ‘aa’, which is why you get both ‘dal’ and ‘daal’ on restaurant menus, and why most non-Indians pronounce – erm, dhaal? – as if it were the first syllable of the word ‘Dalhousie’. Fun!
More complicated, however, is that in… - crap: P’njaabi? – and hundreds of other languages, sounds exist which latinate letters can’t explicitly designate. Going back to ‘dal’, the first sound of the word is a soft d, formed by pushing the tongue against the fleshy bit just above one’s teeth and flattening the tip, making a sound halfway between ‘d’ and ‘th’. Because of this, many words with this soft d sound have it written as ‘dh’.
Trouble is, one has to distinguish between the aspirated and non-aspirated versions of the sound (i.e. the ones with and without ‘a strong exhale of breath’). The… fine! P’njahbee! – word for cilantro starts with the aspirated form of the ‘soft d’ syllable, which you make by placing the flattened tip of your tongue against the spot where the roof of your mouth and teeth meet and then exhaling air with the production of the sound (while, naturally, you spin anti-clockwise three times, glancing up at the sky at those times the moon is in the third quadrant).
So, when using latin script, some write the word for coriander as dhhania, others as dhania and others, most confusingly, as dhdhania, where the repetition indicates the aspiration. Keep in mind that that ‘a’ here is now the same sound as the ‘u’ in ‘cut’ – but that when you put ‘dhhania’ into ‘dal’, the a in ‘dal’ which should be better written ‘dhaal’, sounds like the ‘a’ in ‘czar’.
What? That’s totally clear. Or not.
Of course, one could object to a call for formalisation and systematization, claiming that it unnecessarily restrains creativity and play. But trip-ups in language are only fun when you’re in on the joke. To wit, linguistic slippage is entertainment to word-nerds, but just frustrating for everyone else.
People need to learn languages – and just as importantly, they should learn languages. The era of monolingualism should end; to speak only one language seems out of touch with the global future offered by the internet, particularly if we want to avoid online monoculture and foster something like real cultural exchange.
And in order to begin learning a language, I think some translation from one script to another is necessary. It’s all well and good to insist one simply learn a new script, but it’s not an easy thing, and represents a hurdle that slows fluency considerably. If one can use a phonetic spelling of another language, you can get going a heck of a lot more quickly. And if translating sound is a necessary intermediate step, then we really need to figure out how we’re going to do that.
So, who’s up for the challenge? ‘Cause, I’ll be honest – I could really use some help with this P’njaabee.
More “Future of Liberal Democracy” Stuff
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Diaspora, Immigration, Immigration and Diaspora on May 10, 2009
Bit of a departure in topic for SiW, but this is really worth the read. Famed Marxist critic Terry Eagleton writes on “Culture and Barbarism: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism” in Commonweal. It’s good stuff: it starts by wondering why we all seem to be talking about God more, but goes on to think about multiculturalism and, more interestingly, does a really interesting refiguring of the ‘clash of civilizations’ shtick. It’s long, but worth your time. Here’s a bit of’ the payoff at the end:
The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own.
By the way, if you are ever looking to get a relatively quick gloss of some recent academic theory, Eagleton’s Literary Theory isn’t too bad a place to start.
(Oh, my second ‘by the way’: I read this on the subway this morning using Instapaper on the iPhone. It really is amazing.)
