Gladly Beyond Any Distance

I recently had the opportunity to be part of a reflection process on the work we do as feminists, advocating for gender equality in development organisations. This was with an organisation called Gender at Work, an international knowledge network for gender equality; it’s a group I’ve been associated with since its founding in 2001, though I left them as Program Associate in 2007, when we moved to the Republic of Berkeley. It was such a joy being part of a space that incorporated the striving, thinking and doing of feminist praxis - with fabulous activists who embody that spirit - but it was also a joy (luckily) to reflect on where I am, both personally and professionally, these many years on. It must have something to do with - groan - the milestone of middle age/mid-evil-ness lurking round the corner. Still, at the end of the reflection, I wrote a haiku about change; I suppose it’s a birthday prezzie of sorts to myself.

Touched by the return,

I find my journey forward -

But some of me… stays.

What an annus horribilis 2008 was. Clinical depression of every kind: economic, political, personal. India was bombed repeatedly - and with precise geographical equity: north, south, east, west. I was in both Bangalore and Delhi over the summer, and missed the bombing of N block market by a couple of hours. Similar just-misses reported in from friends in Bombay, but the overall horror of it all goes far beyond close encounters of the worst kind. Between the escalation of rhetoric on the India-Pakistan front, and the egregious escalation of far more than rhetoric on the Israel-Palestine front, the new year feels shop-soiled and already ready for return. But since I have been accused of growing tendrils of Pollyanna-like optimism in the midst of utter despair, I leave you with an image from an India-Pakistan peace vigil I attended early last month, and a poem inspired by that, and this week’s protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza.

We refuse to be enemies.
We refuse to use your words, claim your politics,
accept your versions of history.

We will wear our anger like a shroud,
we will hold our defiance like a shield,
we will carry our compassion like a sword.

We refuse to be enemies.
We refuse to believe that hate is justified,
that peace is weak, that conflict is endless.

We will sing across the borders,
we will march across the divisions,
we will fly our peace like a flag.
We refuse to be enemies.

At around six in the morning on the 1st of May 1997, I was on Magdalen Bridge in Oxford, listening as the Magdalen choir sang in the summer, while the sun came up from behind and shone brighter with each clear note. I then walked slowly to the polling station near home, gathering friends along the way, and cast my vote in a historic election: a landslide victory for Labour, a resounding defeat for the Conservatives after eighteen years of Tory rule. I could vote in the national polls because I was a member of the Commonwealth, and in the local elections because I had been resident in Britain for over six months by then. It was a deeply satisfying, if quirky, event for an Indian to participate in: an acknowledgment, if you like, of the crooked and sometimes unexpected pathways of colonisation, the bound histories of coloniser and colonised.

I’ve thought about those elections a great deal in the past few months, and particularly yesterday. Not in the least because much of that process was about the overwhelming support for Tony Blair, amidst Labour slogans of ‘Enough is Enough’ and ‘Britain Deserves Better’. Personality is key to political victories of this kind, and I can only hope that Obama’s course in history will not end up feeling like betrayal, the broken promise of Blair.

There is much to be critiqued, and even more to be analysed, about these American elections. Including the irritating - and dubious - notion of US exceptionalism when it comes to electing a black man as President. As some of us felt last night while watching the results come in, it wasn’t only ‘Yes, We Can’, and ‘Yes, We Did’, though these were powerful thoughts. For the rest of the world, it was also a sense of ‘Yes, About Time You Did’.

But let those analyses be for tomorrow. For today, I was privileged to be part of an extraordinary moment in a nation’s history, even if as visitor not citizen. The weight of that history came home to me not while listening to the somewhat fatuous commentaries of the news anchors, but through the tears of Congressman John Lewis -  a man who was left beaten and bloody on an Alabama bridge forty years ago, as he marched for the right of African Americans to vote. He called it “a wonderful night… a night of thanksgiving,” and I thought to myself about another elections in 1994, when apartheid was dismantled in South Africa, not blow by blow, but vote by vote.

A South African poet, Adam Schwartzman, wrote this poem at that time, and it rings true for first time voters across the world, and for those, like me, who invest in the notion of participation, who spend years, months, days, working and waiting for that opportunity. Lucky to be born as a voting citizen in a complex country, I try not to take that destiny for granted; in my first elections in India, I went to nearly 20 polling stations before I found my name on the rolls (and Yes, It Wasn’t Easy).

However flawed our democracies, however complicated our experiences of citizenship, casting our vote is a moment of arrival, as well as of continued journey: as voters, as citizens, we bear witness to both.

Vote

I could hear our air over the radio, being everywhere
differently, belonging to no man. I cried for you

—you dumb girl—standing in line with the naughty, safe emigrés,
too far from my home and thinking how you might be now—

water in Retief’s Kloof, night on the Malutis,
silence in the suburbs. When I was a boy I

had you. We were growing ready, learning to be blessed
and slightly forgetful for the time we’d grow away.

I’ve waited to do this with you. I saw the very last day
out with one soft cross. It was my first time too.

Adam Schwartzman (from The Good Life. The Dirty Life. and other stories, Carcanet 1995)
London, 26 April 1994

I have always viewed Colin Powell with discomfort and mistrust for his role in the Bush administration’s war on Iraq. Yet this weekend, as he endorsed Obama, he redeemed himself to a great extent in my eyes; less for his endorsement - because I’m not sure how much that matters in terms of actual votes, though it is a significant nail in the Republican intellectual coffin - but much more for this statement:

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.”

Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim; he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America.

Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?

Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards — Purple Heart, Bronze Star — showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old.

And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross; it didn’t have the Star of David; it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.

Over this troubling US Presidential process, one of the most troubling moments for me was when a supporter of McCain’s said to him at a rally that Obama was Arab, and his response was “No ma’am… he’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” Add to that the sleight of a campaign that conflates racism with Islamophobia and uses Hussein, Obama’s middle name, as shorthand for suspecting all his credentials.

Almost as problematic as the Republican campaign on this, has been the Democrats’ response, or lack thereof. Less appalling in degree from McCain’s instinctual ‘No, Ma’am, he’s a decent family man’ in his rebuttal to the Arab comment, it corrects the premise that Obama is Muslim, because his professed faith is Christian, but it never goes beyond to address this question: why should it matter if he was Arab and/or Muslim? Can’t Arabs be decent family men, and American Muslims aspire to be Presidents of the US? As Naomi Klein says:

What is disturbing about the campaign’s response is that it leaves unchallenged the disgraceful and racist premise behind the entire “Muslim smear”: that being Muslim is de facto a source of shame.

Ditto being Arab. Obviously, it will take many geography and history lessons from Joe Biden to clarify that ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ are not necessarily the same identities.

So for an Indian sitting in America, struggling with anger over remarks of this kind, as well as struggling with anger and despair over what’s going on back home - the persecution of Christians in Orissa and Karnataka, the continued persecution of Muslims, a growing fundamentalism across communities and caste and class violence in general - I have to say Colin Powell’s comment gives some cheer in uncheerful times. It also reminds me that with all my despair over violence in India, at the time I left last year, it had a Sikh Prime Minister, a Muslim President, and a Catholic and a Hindu as leaders of the two biggest political parties, besides an atheist as the Speaker of the House. We are not perfect in any way (very far from it), but there is a history of syncretism in the sub-continent that has been, and should continue to be, a strength we draw upon and expand, rather than abuse. Syncretic, plural cultures that have had some inspiration from the Arab world so vilified in certain American conversations today.

Like comfort food, I often return to simpler - and sometimes, more profound - truths of childhood. One particular poem I remember clearly encountering as a ten year old, was Leigh Hunt’s encomium to the sufi saint Ibrahim Bin Adham, or Abou Ben Adhem, in which ‘exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold’. Let’s hope that same exceeding peace prevails amongst others in the US like Colin Powell, who have the courage, if somewhat belatedly, to seek justice beyond popularity.

From the Daily Kos (and elsewhere on the blogosphere), a brilliant poem by John Cleese on Sean Hannity, the Fox(ed) News anchor. (Btw, 86% of Fox News viewers reportedly thought McCain won the second US Presidential elections’ debate; everyone else thought Obama had).

Ode to Sean Hannity
by John Cleese

Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity

And my own humble response:

John Cleese
terrific tease
always at ease
such a wheeze.
more please?

I’m sure to get ragged by TR about my comment in my post below, saying ‘dissent and debate welcome, hatred unacceptable’. But he certainly knows I’m following a rich and illustrious tradition.

Tom Lehrer, in his introduction to National Brotherhood Week:

I’m sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that.

So another Women’s Day rolls by. This year, this month, I think it fitting to celebrate the feminists in my life who are special to me, and who inspire me in different ways, at different moments of the year. The past month has been particularly significant for me in terms of the writing of two women in my family, and this post celebrates the sis-in-law, who is also friend, feminista and fun. Some time down the line I’ll write about the mother, who is a little difficult to describe in words, which is why I need more time to mull over her. chuckle.

Anindita won the Toto Funds The Arts (TFA) award for creative writing last month in Bangalore. Both awards in this section went to Bongs in Bengaluru, which is interesting enough in itself, but even more so, as Ani - and the rest of us - saw it, was that the award was presented by Amitav Ghosh. Now if that isn’t a matter for joint celebration and collective swooning, I don’t know what is. :-)

Anindita’s poetry is archived at her poetry blog, but here’s a taste of her crisp craftsmanship. I chose this one because it speaks of a woman with a history and a future different from ours, of a woman who “bears the hollows in deep places”. Women’s Day is about celebration, but it is also about consciousness, that sharp poet’s eye for life - for a woman’s living - that can otherwise pass us by in a mundane flurry. Thank you for that watchfulness, and your own, bright, particular voice, Ani.