> It's an intergenerational love language that our parents are taught to use with us.
> They would always ask me what I want, instead of giving suggestions, like this is what you have to do.
> Wait, why are you acting weird? Why are you trying to be different? Why can't you be just normal? You said you want to be with men.
Recently when I visited my Telugu friends in Texas, they cooked so much and fed me, and after a couple of days, they started commenting on my body, saying, oh you need to concentrate on your body, you're getting fat. You spend so much money on your mental health, keep an eye on your body also. I did not react right away, but I responded later, saying, I used to feel like I have to look very lean or that I have to have all these muscles to attract guys. It took a lot of time to unlearn and love my body.
We're taught from our parents and their parents that you bond with each other by making comments about other. They don’t ask, how do you feel? They would just tell you how to feel.
all pronouns with respect
I HAD TO COME OUT three times to my parents - as gay, as genderqueer, and as a drag artist. Coming out as a gay man was the easiest process that I've ever done in my life. Nobody was bothered by it because I was presenting as cis male.
Whoever I came out to – my schools friends or any other friend who was in my circle – they were really supportive, like, oh, my God, we love you regardless, you do you, whatever you’re doing in your room, that doesn't matter.
Once I started exploring my gender, wearing nail polish or earrings or whatever, that's when they’d just freak out.
And I'm like -
I still want to be with with men, but my gender identity is different than my sexuality. It’s a lot to unlearn for them. Eventually, some people dropped out from my circle.
Like I said, I was very masc, I was going to the gym, I had my muscles, taking shirtless pictures for Instagram. At that point all these gay men wanted to be with me. But there's a lot of femmephobia, even amongst gay men. And so when I started exploring my gender, eventually these gay men stopped wanting to hang out with me. Interestingly, these same people came back when I started doing drag, because they wanted to be associated with a drag queen.
I HAVE SEEN DRAG representations since I was like 10 or 12 years old. We didn't know it was drag, because drag is a western term, but there's a lot of drag that's enrooted in South Asian culture. They have been doing it for ages and we don't call it as drag, we just call it an art form: Kuchipudi, Bharatanatyam, Odissi. Where men have been dressing up as women, women are doing male characters. And I personally had the privilege to see my grandfather doing Bhama Kalapam. I've seen him doing his makeup, he had jewelry.
I was like, it's really fascinating that my grandpa is doing women characters and it's considered an art form. I think there's an accessibility for a cis man to do women characters, because he is married and has kids. He has gained that heterosexual card. He could be with guys, maybe not, but he has that card, so it’s okay. So that’s also what my mom tells me now: she says, first get married, have kids…Then do whatever you want, I don't care. It’s that don’t ask, don’t tell situation.
BECAUSE I'M AWAY from my parents, I have individual freedom and I can own up to my identity, even though my parents are saying, no, don't do that. If I was in India and with my parents, I would probably not be able to, because the fear that comes with being around with them is a lot. I definitely am two different persons. When I talk to my parents, I take off my nose ring and earrings and everything. I try to talk about what's going on in my life and in my community, but they don't like to listen.
So I wonder, do I really need to talk about it? Because they're happy with me just being like this, without my earrings and everything. So I don't try to portray my feelings and my opinions about my community to them and make them understand, although low-key I try sometimes with my sister, but not with my mom, because I don't want her to be sad and upset and worried at this age. I just want to make her happy.
I'M 28 YEARS old now, and until I was 23 years old, I was in India, born and brought up. I’d never even been outside of Andhra Pradesh. Growing up, I was taught that your only friends are from your family. You're not supposed to have any other friends. I never knew any Western culture, I never really had any access to it. I moved to Washington, D.C. when I was 23 years old and these past five years, I have unlearned a lot, especially with toxic relationships I’ve had with my friends and parents, and even with myself.
I'm lucky that I've been surrounded by people who accept me the way I am and support me.
These people made me feel safe when I was on my journey. Even with my drag, I started off without makeup, without any wigs. I just put on a lehenga and blouse, and my friends never pushed me to do anything more, they waited for me to be ready. Now it’s evolved a lot and I just want to see more Brown men doing drag and I want to see more drag kings.
KAMANI SUTRA (all pronouns with respect) is a bearded genderqueer drag artist, progressive aunty, and the founder of the TeluGAY Queer Project. You can follow them here to learn about their latest performances and you can support their work here.
> And the thing is, I have unlearned a lot.
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picture by Shriya Samavai
an excerpt from Spellbound
picture by Shriya Samavai
> Even if it was tenuous and even if it was something of an illusion, I felt like an identity was really beginning to coalesce.
she/her
GROWING UP, my parents made me take Bengali lessons and we would always go to Bengali pujas in New Jersey or Long Island. Beyond that, they were also interested in Bengali music. There were always songs of Tagore at home. I happily played along with it at the time, but I only took the memories of that more seriously once they were gone. When I was growing up or when I was younger than this, I would sort of shy away from wearing clothes that mark you from a certain place. By going back to these clothes that I never wore, it was a way of trying to bring that sense of comfort and belonging back to life. Of course at that time, I also never wore those kinds of clothes because they would have been too feminine.
ALONG WITH DISCOVERING my transness, I became more interested in reimmersing myself and wondering what it means to be South Asian. It was when we went back to India in 2016 that I started to wonder what it would be like to start wearing salwar kameezes or kurtas, and I started wearing my hair in braids. And I think I recognized something in that that I hadn't before. Those clothes and that kind of appearance suited me somehow, and I think other Desi people recognized that as well. And I felt an ease, which was more important to me than the feedback.
What allowed me to be me before I was trans was being goth – which I still feel like I am. But that caused some friction with mom and dad because, well, for the obvious reasons, they thought I looked ridiculous, but they also thought I looked like a girl. Why do you want to look like a girl, that's what Mom always said to me. At the time I thought – even though this is not something I could say to her – that's not what I'm aiming for, this is just an aesthetic that pleases me and happens to be quite femme. But I think whatever friction we had was probably the same friction a lot of parents have with their kids who are rebelling or adopting a subcultural identity.
> I guess my main feeling, if you can call it that, before I really came out was that I didn't even know there was a possibility for someone like me to say that I was trans.
I had a very rigid idea of what trans meant. I thought that you had to medically or chemically alter yourself or that you have to have some kind of major transformation in order to say that you are trans. I haven't really done any of those things. I've always kind of been this way under one guise or another. But I never called myself trans because I really didn't know what I was. I don't know if I was happy to do that, but I just didn't know any better to than be undeclared, or to just use whatever pronouns were attached to me.
MY WORK AS an artist and writer is also a way for me to reconnect or connect to things that I found to be very fleeting. I wonder why I want to always go back to a place or a time or a culture or a memory that doesn't exist. I don't go back that often to India and when I did, it was always at a distance. So what is it that I'm always trying to capture? I think, in a way, that thing that I'm trying to capture is in itself an illusion. The only way I can make any sense of it is to write it or to draw it or to propose it in an imaginary space, which maybe is okay, because our reality is too complicated and too problematic.
Sometimes, though, my work is just a question of wanting to see that kind of representation out in the world. I think it's really important to put trans stories out there that are real and I don't want to say positive, because it makes it sound like a greeting card or something, but…stories that are not based on trauma. I think the more trans creators that are out there, the more there will be multiple narratives that are not based on tragedy or trauma or one’s queerness being the point of conflict.
> I think the work of the imagination is really important.
It took a while and it was very twisty and turny to get to a point where I can say, hey, I’m an artist and now I can also admit that I'm a writer, which is a funny thing to say because I never thought I could call myself that.
It was circumstance that led to my trans identity being uncovered. So much of it seems unplanned, contrary to the sort of traditional narrative of ‘trans awakening.’ So looking forward, I think that will continue to be the case and those are things that I can't necessarily foresee. I also feel that as a person of a certain age, I feel okay. I think a lot of folks who are trans regret that they didn't transition or come out earlier, but I feel like I'm actually looking forward to seeing what becoming older is like. I feel OK with who I am at the age that I am. I am completely embracing being an aunty, or as some of the queer South Asian kids in Kensington (a neighborhood in Brooklyn) call me, ‘gothic aunty.’
BISHAKH SOM (she/her) is a graphic novelist and writer, whose work explores themes of gender, sexuality, memory, and urbanism, amongst other things. She had two graphic novels out in 2020: Apsara Engine, a collection of eight short stories published by The Feminist Press and Spellbound, a graphic memoir published by Street Noise Books. She was born in Addis Ababa and grew up in New York City, where she still lives. You can follow her journey here.
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But after a while, after meeting some trans people who assumed I was trans, that’s when I started to feel like that was a possibility and more so maybe, it was already a reality that I was unaware of. That's when I was like, this makes so much sense and I'm feeling a lot more comfortable not using the pronouns that were assigned to me. Things seemed to align mentally with me for the first time.
At the beginning I was using gender neutral pronouns because I wanted to just dip a toe into the water. And eventually even that seemed wrong because that's not even who I am. I am a femme.
she/her
> We live in a low income neighborhood. I went to public school two blocks away from my house. But I think watching TV is where I learned there's a difference between classes and that's when I when I realized, oh, we're poor.
WHEN I WAS GETTING MY MASTER'S degree. I was also working full time and also doing comedy on the side when I could. I'd tell my parents things like, oh, I got some school work to do, but really I'm doing a show or something. But after graduating, I was like, I don't have any excuses anymore. So that's when I kind of told them the truth, they know that I do some hosting type of thing. But they don't want to be like, yeah my daughter is a comedian, so they don't ever say it out loud. It's still hard to to be open about it. But laughter has always been a part of my life. Even as a kid, my whole persona was just to entertain my family. I was always the loud one and I was always getting in trouble for being loud, because, you know, as a South Asian girl, you're supposed to be demure and have a secret or something. But I was like I'm going to be loud, there's ice cream cake in the room.
MY GRANDFATHER, my mom’s dad, fought in the Bangladesh Liberation War: he was an artillery supplier. After the war ended, a lot of freedom fighters were under attack and so my grandfather decided to move to the US. Some years later, he sent for the rest of his family and my mom moved to New York. Meanwhile, my dad came to America on a student visa. He went to piloting school in Texas, but he got into an accident and so he didn’t really finish his licensing and started working in Chicago. My mom and dad heard about each other through their biodatas and agreed to marry each other. My mom moved to Chicago, which is where I was born. We moved to East New York, Brooklyn when I was six years old, after my brother got sick. He has neurological and physical disabilities and we had a lot more support in New York with my mom’s side of the family being here.
GROWING UP I knew that I loved entertainment and that I loved to entertain people, but I didn’t have any grasp of what that meant. We get to say we live in the greatest city in the world, but we don't get to experience any of the greatest city aspects when you grow up in a poor neighborhood. When I was a kid, I didn't know Broadway was in New York because I felt like it was some place that I would not be allowed. It’s only way into your adulthood that you realize, shit, there are several different New Yorks. There's a New York that you don't even know.
As a kid, I definitely felt I didn't want to identify as Bengali. There was always this cloak of embarrassment surrounding the culture. I felt like being Indian was just more palatable and cooler, and so I’d say I was Indian. And then as I got older and met more Bengalis, I realized how important that identity was. I used to think, oh, we're all the same. But I realised that no, we're not.
I READ SOMEWHERE that Bangladeshis are possibly one of the biggest communities in the US that are right below the poverty line. And not many Indians and Pakistanis experience that, because they'll come from their countries with degrees and things like that and they'll work and go to school, and then become doctors or something. I realized that the reason why I didn't grow up around many Indians or Pakistanis was because they were growing up in the suburbs. So, yeah, I did not have the experience a lot of Indians did of being bullied by white people. I didn't even meet white people until I went to college. I didn't have the classic story of getting bullied for my lunch because my lunch was the free lunch that they gave at school. I qualified for that shit. And my experience is something that I don't hear people talk about or see people telling stories about, because I feel a lot of the South Asian storytellers in Hollywood are a little more privileged than I am, not to downplay any of the work that they did.
> I do a lot of my own research: Islam is actually supposed to be an easy religion to follow. And also it feels selfish to just do good deeds to end up in heaven. I want to do good and I want to treat people with respect because people deserve it.
I THINK AS A Bangladeshi Muslim, my parents will use fear tactics to teach us about religion. Like make sure you never miss a prayer or you’ll end up in hellfire. Everything was just ‘or else you'll end up in hellfire.' So that’s where a lot of disconnect comes in and we feel very othered by our own religion. We grow up with these identities of Bangladeshi and American and also Muslim. So it's like, where do I fit all of these identities inside of me? It really does take just growing up to understand that you get to practice Islam in a way that suits you.
My parents are very by the book Muslims, but they weren't always this religious. I think the community changed them. My mom didn't wear a hijab before, but now she she wears a hijab because everyone in our neighborhood wears one. They're both silly, funny people – I remember, when I was younger, my dad would be the life of the party. But they also get very wound up by what society expects. For instance, they’re dying to get me married. It’s been a difficult time with them on this subject because they think that I'm 30, I should have been married by now.
Zubi Ahmed (she/her) is a writer, comedian, and filmmaker. She is one of the hosts of Kutti Gang, a live comedy show featuring South Asian performers. She is the writer and director of Polterheist, a comedy web-series featured in the South Asian Film Festival of America and NY Lift-Off Film Fest. Being multi-lingual, understanding both eastern and western cultures and growing to appreciate them both in different ways, and also growing up in big cities her whole life has given her a different perspective. You can find out what she’s currently up to here.
I feel like no matter what we do, we're going to be tokenized in one way or another because there's so many intersections to us. But are we going to stop ourselves from telling our story in fear that we're going to be tokenized? I don’t think we should. Because there will be people who will read your story and be like, this is exactly me, you know, and they’ll feel less lonely. I think we have to get used to juggling those fears, because, if you stop yourself from sharing your story, who are you really helping?
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And now, every time I perform comedy, that's the one time that I feel good about myself, especially if I'm doing well. That's when I feel like, OK, I don't need to worry about what my parents are thinking. Performing comedy just puts me in a different dimension altogether.
I'M BIRACIAL – Indian and African-American. My mom came to the States for grad school and then she met my dad and they got married. My childhood was pretty funny because I would grow up watching Bollywood movies and then I would also listen to old bands that my dad used to listen to, like The Temptations or really old jazz music. My dad got along with my mother's parents, but my mother's sister and brother...that's kind of a different story, because sometimes, they like to stick with old stereotypes. They joke around with my dad about him not having a dad growing up because I mean, that's just the stereotype we all get. I remember when a family member told him that he kind of resembled a gorilla a little bit. We don't speak to that person anymore.
AT AN EARLY AGE, I really did not have a clear concept of what race or ethnicity was. So I mainly went by skin color. I would just call myself Brown. That was pretty much it. It wasn't until I got to middle school that I started identifying myself with my race and ethnicity. But for a while I would mostly identify as Indian because I will admit, I did have some internalized anti-Blackness in me and for a while, I thought being Black meant inherently criminal. I think that came from not having a whole lot of Black role models that were available for me to look up to. And for a while, I was pretty ignorant.
THAT CHANGED when I got called the N-word while driving, like straight up. I accidentally cut someone off while learning how to drive at the age of 17, and when I turned to go and apologize, the man screams “you stupid f-ing n*. And I was like, wow, OK. It shouldn't have to take somebody being racist to you for you to finally realize that, OK, I'm Black and no matter what I do, people are always going to be racist idiots and are always going to assume the worst as soon as they see my skin color. So I might as well just embrace this shit.
That's when I really started to learn more about activism and the Black Panther movement and how they have inspired almost every single movement in this country. They really just gave me a whole other meaning of what it meant to be Black, other than what the media was showing me.
I did have a lot of internalized colorism because every time I would go to different Indian family members' houses either here or in India, I would always find Fair and Lovely or Fem or one of those skin bleaching creams. I can even look in my drawers and find some old used-up creams that my mom uses. But as a kid, I did not have money so I couldn't buy any face creams. So literally I would do the most and have lemon juice and sugar baths almost every week or something, just to make myself lighter. And the amount of effort that I would put into lightening my skin even confused me a little. I think when I was 15, I was like, what the hell's the point of all this? It's not doing anything. It's just making you even feel worse about yourself. I was like, nah, this is too much even for me.
GROWING UP IN A GENTRIFIED NEIGHBORHOOD in Brooklyn, I wasn’t interacting with a lot of people of color my age. I distinctly remember when I was five years old, for whatever reason we had an assignment where we would have to draw each other. And my partner was drawing me and I remember she reached for a marker that I felt was too dark for my skin tone and I just started crying. It was stupid looking back at it right now, but when I was a kid, I was genuinely devastated that she drew me a different color than what I actually was like. And that color was darker.
And ever since then I just embraced my skin just a little bit more, a little bit more at a time. I think when people like Lupita Nyong'o came along, I felt a little bit better about myself. And that's the great thing about representation – it makes people who have all these deep-seated insecurities that they don't really tell other people feel a little bit better about themselves.
I do get the occasional comments on Instagram talking about, oh, she don't even look fully Indian. You just look Black. And it's just so funny. Whenever they comment stuff like that, it's just like, well, what do you expect me to do about that? I mean, yeah, I have mostly my dad's face, but at the same time, that doesn't take away from the fact that I have a whole South Asian mom just right there. It gets a little irritating after a while, but it doesn't happen that often. And I think for the most part, I get embraced by the community.
> I'm very proud to represent both sides of my heritage, but I feel like with my South Asian side, as I grow up and as I start to recognize the anti-Blackness and colorism even more and more, I just feel the need to call it out more than anything.
BREE SIMRAN DARBY (she/her) is a social media agitator, dismantling white supremacy and confronting the anti-Blackness in our communities. She’s also a skilled registered nurse in training. Follow her work here.
> I thought if I identify as Indian, if discrimination did come my way, it would be less discrimination. Because at that time, I felt like South Asians had less of a stigma in white society than Black people did.
she/her
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they/them
I grew up in wealthy white suburbs, so all my friends were white. We were the only Brown people on the block. I think when I was younger, I was really interested in South Asian culture. I begged my dad for a really long time to teach me Bengali and he wouldn’t. Now I have this weird thing where I don't speak any Indian languages. And then, I think as I got older, in middle and high school, I was ashamed and wanted to fit in with the overwhelming whiteness of the places that I was in.
MY DAD GREW UP in India. My mom is kind of a mutt: her mom was American, she was born in Belgium, and lived in both India and the U.S. Her dad was living in Bangladesh during partition. The part of Bangladesh he was in became India, so he was kind of a refugee. He came to the US once he was an adult. And then my dad came to the US for college.
> It's been a struggle my whole life, of not being American enough nor Indian enough.
I'm a people pleaser, and so, I feel like I have to play out the identity of the people that I'm with. For instance, I don't like how gendered Indian clothing is, but I feel like I have to participate in all of that in order to be South Asian. Or if I'm out at a dinner party with South Asian family and friends...I'll just be a 'good Indian girl' versus at college, I play up my queerness more. I also feel like I don't know many people who are mixed. A lot of the people I know…both of their parents are South Asian. With my mom being half-white, we’re a blend of not only the US and India, but also in terms of race.
> Honestly, I've felt more discomfort from South Asian people being like, you're not South Asian enough, than I have from white people.
It's like you feel outcasted from your own community. But I also don't want to take up someone else’s space because I think it's a different experience, growing up in India and then coming to the US versus me, being born in the US. It's hard to know how to balance that dynamic.
I think I like to call my South Asian identity out because people can never tell where I'm from. They ask the dreaded question of, what are you? People always speak Spanish to me too. But at the same time, I definitely benefit from India being this dominating place, People think anyone who is South Asian is from India.
I LIVED IN INDIA for four months my junior year of college. A week before I flew to India, I found out it was still illegal to be gay and panicked. I had a really horrific experience living there. I feel like I went there wanting to trace my lineage and explore the country that my family comes from. I wanted to find a sense of belonging. I feel this in the US, and then I thought going and living in India would fulfil the rest of what’s missing. But I felt like such a foreigner because I didn't speak the language. I was queer with a shaved head and tattoos and was constantly bombarded with the fact that it's illegal to be queer. I felt frustrated and angry. It has made me hesitant to want to have anything to do with India. I also have a disease that progressively declines my vision, and I feel like disability is very stigmatized in India. It's traumatic to constantly be encountered with the fact that a huge part of your identity isn't accepted, and for it to be a country where it's your own culture complicates it.
I think I'm really lucky in that my parents are very supportive of my queerness, but we're kind of distanced from my dad's side of the family because they're very conservative and my parents don't want to deal with it.
NOW I'M MORE INTERESTED in finding queer South Asian community and belonging in New York. I went to a very queer social justice-oriented college and started to feel more comfortable in my identity there, but also not, because it was very white. A lot of queer spaces are very white-dominated and also it's a lot of gay men. I often feel in conflict in those spaces, but I think the more I find queer South Asian people, the more at ease I feel.
I'm getting more comfortable, just kind of existing in the nuance, in the gray area of 'identity is complex.' I don't have to fit into a single box, and neither do you.
KEYA ACHARYA (they/them) is a poet, artist, and activist who recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Much of their time is spent working towards prison abolition. You can follow them here.
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MY PARENTS ARE PAKISTANI and they both were born and raised in Pakistan. I was born in Berkeley, California and raised in the East Bay Area. My parents identify as Pakistani, but for me, saying I’m South Asian or Desi is much more comfortable. That’s partly because the relationship of British colonialism and the establishment of Pakistan is interesting to me. And partly it’s that we come from a culture that was in India for so long. Even the way Muslims in Pakistan practice Islam, there’s a lot of influence from India. I don't like the divisiveness of national labels, but I also don’t believe in the erasure of the differences. I think the differences are valuable. I'm still figuring it out.
The pre 9/11 experience is that nobody knew where Pakistan was and nobody knew what it was like. I'd be like, oh, it’s over near Afghanistan and Iran and India. And people would be like, oh, so you're Indian? And I’d say, no, I'm Pakistani. It's a whole different country. The post 9/11 experience is...well I think my mom still tells a lot of people that she's Indian because in all fairness, her parents were, and sometimes it's safer. It’s not exactly the safest thing in the world lately to be Muslim or to be Pakistani or to have any sort of affiliation with Islam.
she/her
> There is the pre 9/11 experience of being Pakistani and the post 9/11 experience of being Pakistani.
I'VE HAD TO OVERCOME a lot of internalized racism and that was really challenging. I mostly contribute that to spending my most formative years in corporate Christian suburbia. I think it took me into my mid-twenties to realize that people don't just hate me, they’re just racist. I remember how someone I worked with refused to learn my name. I kept correcting them every time they said my name wrong and so they just stopped using my name altogether. And that was a horrible feeling, you know, and not the first time that I've experienced that either. Or the last.
> I don't think I'm anything even remotely close to what my parents expected out of a South Asian daughter, and that was even before my queer identity came along.
I basically flunked high school. I changed my major in college nine times. At one point my mom had basically told me she gave up on me. Before she was like, be a doctor, be an engineer, be a lawyer, and then she was just like, just finish college, get any degree.
When it came to my queer identity, I had a revelation last year when I was in London that I was queer. I was twenty-nine. I always sort of knew that I’m probably a little bisexual, but I grew up in a conservative family and I thought, if I can choose, I might as well pick the path of least resistance and just stick to men, because it'll just be easier.
I'm pretty sure the first thing I did when I got back from London was cry. I was so upset because I was like, how did I not acknowledge this about myself? I consider myself so self-aware. And also just like, why me? Being queer is so beautiful, but also the way the world is set up for you is so cruel. I spent a lot of time crying and bargaining and seeing if I could backpedal, but also having moments of just like, are you sure? And I definitely went through the phase of Googling, how do you know you're queer, and pretty much every article was like, bitch, if you’re Googling it, you're probably queer. Now I look back and I'm just like, the shit you were doing was queer as fuck. How did you not know?
So as far as the melding of my identities goes, I’m still working on that. I grew up in a South Asian community in a very particular part of California where everyone's very by the book and very just middle of the road, like keep your head down, mind your own business, make an income, raise a family, don't do anything. So there were no queer people in our community that I was aware of and the only queer people I heard about were spoken about in rumors and hushed reverent tones.
I’M KIND OF OUT to every other circle, but I’m not officially out to my family. I’m not hiding my queerness from them, but it's just not a conversation I've had with them yet. I’ve had a pretty difficult relationship with my family for quite some time, but mostly, in this last year that I've been learning about my queerness, I was in a really sensitive space temporally and energetically. I really just needed to focus on my own experience, because my relationship to my queerness was so fragile at first. And honestly growing up in an environment where you frequently heard about people that our family knew in Pakistan getting arrested for being gay…how do you come out to that?
So if anyone has questions about my queerness that aren’t from a place of great intentions, I don't have to answer them, and I’m giving myself permission to sort of do that.
I RECENTLY HAD A BIG MOMENT of being like, oh, I need other South Asian people that are also queer. Because it's not the same experience when you're queer and white, or queer and Black, or queer and Indigenous…it’s just different. Especially with the challenges I knew I was going to go through.
The decision to be out, but also not come out, that was something that I think was very specific to my background, because I'm not going to live my life in fear, life's short, but also it's not anyone's fucking business.
SAMIA ZAIDI (she/her) is an artist and filmmaker based in the East Bay Area and Los Angeles. She’s also the founder of Pitch, Please, a design and consulting firm for directors' treatments, moodboards, and pitch decks for motion content, still photography, and experiential design. You can follow her work here.
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she/her
Tw: suicidal ideation, rape, sexual assault
GROWING UP during the civil war, when I was seven years old, our school was bombed. When I was 12, we had another major suicide bombing. I’m Sinhalese and I had a Tamil friend and she came to me crying and told me that her mom had passed. Me being 12 and the majority culture there, my first response was, how could she die? She’s Tamil. And I remember her as a 12 year old telling me that bombs don't know the difference between Sinhalese and Tamils. I couldn't process it at that point, but years later, I recognized the power of those words and recognized that this is where racism gets to.
When I was 14 or 15, I wanted to watch the first ever queer panel that was being shown on TV and my mom said, no, you can’t watch that, you're going to get corrupted. It was very confusing for me because I was already asking questions about my sexuality. So hearing my mom say I shouldn't watch it because I’d get corrupted, and also saying that it was a Western construct...I was like, wow, so am I already corrupted? Coming to the US was like I had a blank slate, because I just felt so constrained and stifled in Sri Lanka.
> I needed to figure myself out as a human being, especially with regard to my sexual identity.
I love my parents, but at the same time, there's a lot of conservative ideals that they hold on to, and there was a lot of baggage that came from living in that patriarchal culture. For instance, discovering I had a half-brother when I was 18. The reason is because in places like Sri Lanka, it’s totally okay for the man to get divorced, but for the woman, even if she gets her divorce completely legitimately, you don't talk about it. So I didn't know that my mom had been married previously and that she had a child from a previous marriage until I was eighteen, while at the same time, I have a good relationship with my half-brother from my dad's side.
I WAS MOLESTED as a seven year old child by my cousin, and that had a major impact on how I perceived myself and the world. When I went home as a college student and opened up to my mom for the first time about that experience, her first response was, oh, that happens to everyone, it happened to me. That just shut me down and I felt like I was just not going to talk about it with her again. When I came to the US, I was raped my first semester as a freshman by one of my friends, and I didn’t know how to process that either. The combination of never processing being molested or raped, having to live two lives (in Sri Lanka and the US) because of my sexual identity, working as a sexual assault advocate on campus, being in an abusive relationship at the time...all this was really messing with me.
It just hit me at the same time. I was having suicidal ideations. It was so nuts that it had to get to that point where I realized that I was making plans. But I was lucky enough to recognize that this was not normal for me. And I also recognized that I didn't have the capacity to stop myself because I was decomposing very quickly. It’s funny because I remember my grad assistant was looking at me and said, how do you do it? You seem so put together. And I just wanted to scream and tell her, I was not, I was completely unraveling inside - but I couldn’t. Because at that point I was on a work visa and I felt if I talked about my mental health, I was compromising my job. I was super fortunate to have a supervisor who was an immigrant, and was very understanding of what I was going through. And that helped me take that step that I needed to get help.
> I went to a psychiatric ward and it was just one of the best decisions that I had made for myself. I changed my life completely.
When I was four years old, I remember one of my uncles coming to me and telling me, your parents are so fair, what happened to you? Also when I was four or five, I was in the playground, wanting to play on the swing and heard a couple of kids telling me, don't let the dark girl use the swing. I’ve been feeling more comfortable in my own skin in the US than back home, but recently I’ve been living in more conservative spaces and have felt more uncomfortable, not just not because of the color of my skin, but because I'm in an interracial relationship. Just two days before the riot at the Capitol, a self-identified white supremacist had DM'd my husband and had told him that our child was going to be genetically and mentally defective because she's a product of interbreeding. And that really hit me, like wow, I’d created this biracial child and she's being targeted and she's not even two years old.
I CAME OUT as bisexual when I was twenty-eight because it was just so difficult to live two lives and I felt like I needed to at least come out in the US because I was so tired of being stifled. And so that was one of the first things that I did when I started doing the diversity inclusion work that I was doing. I actually came out during a conference and it was just such a wonderful experience for me to come out in front of people who are so supportive. Now at Vassar College, I'm the director of the LGBTQ+ center and that's my label. And I had to say that to my parents when I did the visa letter so that they could come to see my first kid's birth. My dad actually told me, hey, can you change your title because in Sri Lanka, it's still a criminal offence to come from the queer community, we might not get our visas because of this. I told them, you should be fine.
> I have never felt attractive in Sri Lanka.
ONE OF THE REASONS I am doing the work that I'm doing at Vassar is because I realised very quickly that in these spaces there are so many students who are only now navigating their queerness and don't feel comfortable even to walk into the center because they don’t think they’re queer enough to come and use our resources. So that's something that I've been really working actively on: helping students understand, like hey, wherever you are in your journey, this space is for you. Me being the director of the center has also helped a lot of South Asians and international students feel more comfortable using the space because they’re coming from cultures and communities where this is still a stigma.
With my kids, I really want to break those cycles. It's so important to listen to your kids - that's something that I'm learning to do more. With my daughter, she can't talk yet, but once she can, I want to make sure that I'm constantly listening, instead of telling her that hey, this is my experience, this is what I went through. I want her to understand that she always has a choice and she has agency and she has someone who will always listen to her and be there for her.
> I wanted these spaces, I wanted this type of support when I was growing up. I didn't have it. And I feel like it's important to be able to provide it for others.
DANUSHI FERNANDO (she/her) is a nationally certified queer mental health practitioner and social justice advocate. She is the Director of LGBTQ and Gender Resources at Vassar College where she heads the Womens' Center and the LGBTQ Center.
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I WAS BORN AND RAISED in Omaha, Nebraska. My mom is white and American and my dad is from Guyana. He left Guyana when he was 18 or 19. My parents got divorced when I was around 10, so I was raised mostly by my mom, but I’m very close to my dad's side of the family. He's one of eight siblings and they all came over from Guyana and centered in Nebraska for a bit. But growing up, I didn't really know much about being Guyanese. I knew my dad said we're Indian. I remember one time asking him, you said we’re West Indian, so what's East Indian? Are those just different sides of India?
He was like, oh no, those are two different places. He’s also been kind of in denial of his Blackness. His father was Indian and his mother was Black Surinamese. But because my grandfather was the male of the household, his culture was dominant, and my dad always said, we're Indian. Despite that, my grandma would tell me, I’m a proud Black woman, so that makes you a Black woman too. So it was all very confusing.
IT WASN'T UNTIL COLLEGE that I met another Guyanese person who was not in my family. And that was when I realized that, oh, there's multiple ways to be Guyanese. It's not a monolith, not everyone knows their whole history. Not everyone knows what ship their great-grandparents came over on and from where in India their families came from. And so it was interesting to meet people like me, who are the children of immigrants and are experiencing being Guyanese-American – and that it's not wrong to do it either way.
I've talked to my dad about why he hesitates to identify as Guyanese. He’s kind of trained himself out of an accent and doesn’t really speak the creole of typical Guyanese, and I think he thought it would be more of a challenge. Coming to Nebraska, he had to adapt, and I think he kind of just embraced being Indian more. The year he came here is also when Jonestown was happening, and so people associated Guyanese people with bad things. I think he also distanced himself from being Guyanese because he was tired of getting questions like:
> "Guyana? Oh, do you mean Ghana? Oh, where is that?” But now he's more embracing of it and it's nice to see him reconnecting with it (to a certain extent).
I USED TO THINK that I had to prove my identity, doing a DNA test to be like, look, I am Black, I am Indian. Now I view it as, being a very mixed person, I am Indian, I am Black, I am white, but I'm not half this, half that, a quarter this, a quarter that. So I've really learned to embrace the fullness of my identities while also being conscious of what spaces I'm in and how I present. I won't ever face the same oppression as Black people in the United States do, and so as a mixed person, it can be part of my identity, but it’s not what speaks the most about my identity. So finding the balance between all of that, while proudly claiming an identity that my family has pushed aside for a while has been challenging. I have also started to really identify with my Indo-Caribbean side in general. It influences a lot of the work that I do and the things that I'm passionate about.
DISABILITY HAS BEEN an interesting thing for me. I have Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which is a genetic mutation, a chronic illness that makes all my collagen defective in my body. It causes chronic pain and my joints dislocate easily and all this stuff, but it's a very invisible illness. Navigating chronic illness as a younger person is already a feat in itself. Navigating it in the Indo-Caribbean community has been more difficult because it tends to be a pride thing about how people are perceived. And so if you're walking with a cane, people will say, oh, everyone's going to stare at you, do you really need that?
> It took a really long time to get over that fear of how I'm being perceived because the words of my family kind of echoed in the back of my head.
Two of my aunts have Fibromyalgia, and they've struggled with chronic pain, and just hearing other people in the family kind of be like, oh, they're exaggerating. And I'm like, well, if they're saying these things to me, then they're probably saying these things about me. If I tell them that, yeah, I'm disabled, they say, but why would you say that? That's not a good thing. And I'm like, it's part of my identity and it's something I claim. It's not a dirty, bad word. I am proudly disabled. And I think it comes from the stigma of showing off a weakness. Even with my grandma, she has Parkinson's and is like, I hate using this walker, it’s so obnoxious, people look at me. And I think it’s just the pride of having been independent and overcome so much for so long. There is just an aversion to being perceived as weak in any way.
Standing up to any elders in your family is hard because they’ll just be like, why can't you just do this? It'll be really quick. And you're like, OK, it’s my auntie, I have to do this for them. While knowing that I'll suffer later for it. Setting boundaries and learning about my body and the boundaries that it sets for me, and then listening to them and being able to assert those is what makes it really difficult. I also suffer from mental health issues, and I think setting boundaries wasn't something I was comfortable doing until I realized that it's self-preservation. I think especially as Black and Brown women, we’re told to be the martyr and sacrifice ourselves for the betterment of others. Seeing my aunt getting up and cooking dinner even though no one asked her, or seeing my grandma persevere through so many hardships, I’ve kind of inherited that generational message of: you have to sacrifice yourself so everyone else can be happy and in turn you will be happy.
> And I think what I've learned is, I've got one life and it's mine. I can set boundaries and I don't have to suffer and there can be a happy medium.
I’ve also found a safe space among my friends who are like my chosen family. What’s been really helpful for me in wanting to claim my disability and learn about my disability is finding online spaces of people who have the same illness as me or finding groups for queer Indo-Caribbean people. Finding friendships among people who share similar identities has been one of the strongest things that's kept me going.
LISSA DEONARAIN (she/they) is a documentary filmmaker, producer, and editor. Her films explore social justice issues and themes such as identity, belonging, and memory. Her film Double Diaspora explores the unique and vibrant experiences of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in Queens, New York. You can explore her work here.
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EVERYONE I'M CLOSELY RELATED TO on my Guyanese side is very accepting of my queerness, but there’s definitely a lot of socialized and internalized anti-queerness in Guyanese culture. I’ve seen gender identity being an even more difficult thing people are trying to tackle, especially with pronouns and misgendering people. That said, I’ve been thankful to be surrounded by some really great Indo-Caribbean organizations who have been advocating for making spaces safer, and I also found a really great queer community of POC women and non-binary folks in college, which gave me room to explore and be proud.
We immediately moved because there was a lot happening in the battle with the Maoist insurgency. For my mom, it was really challenging, because in her mind, she’d worked really hard to be in a position where she had certain things done for her and here, to start from square one was really difficult for her. She was almost a minister in Nepal and then here, she was working at 7-Eleven, scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets and things like that. But I think for my parents, because me and my sister were both girls, they knew that in Nepal we wouldn't have the opportunities that we would have here. I guess that's 'the sacrifice,' really, although I don't like that word.
> We knew that it was a 'sacrifice' because we knew what they were leaving behind.
I’VE ALWAYS FELT like I had a dual identity – Nepali and American. It was more distinct after college, but even in high school, it’s like you have a different set of cultures and values when you’re at home, versus when you’re out. And it wasn’t like I was half one and half other. I knew that I was completely Nepali and I was also getting acclimated to being American. Now, I’m both Nepali and American. When I moved out to go to college at the age of 18, I had to figure out how much of both my identities I am really going to take on, versus how much of it was toxic, stuff that I needed to push back on.
It took a lot of time and work to merge both identities into one whole. For instance, my name is Aakriti, and a lot of people started pronouncing it differently and they were like, Uh-Kreetee. Initially, I would nervously laugh at them - with fear of being judged for having a different name. Whereas with my parents, if someone would say Uh-kreetee they would always look at them like, who the hell are you talking about, that's not my daughter. And honestly, my friends from college hate me for it (while of course respecting my decision) because all they've known me as is Uh-kreetee, and now I’m going back to the way my name is really supposed to be pronounced.
I'VE ALWAYS USED NEPALI over Nepalese because I think that the word Nepalese is very colonial. Before English was around in Nepal, no Nepali person would ever refer to anything that they did as Nepalese, and then out of the blue, especially in the last 20 years or so, you've really seen the word Nepalese take over
> But Nepalese is actually something that is external, that the West has used to define us and it's like, how or why are we allowing these new identities to take over?
For me, it comes from a place of frustration and not really understanding how that shift happened. But seeing it is really like, wow, we never really identified ourselves like this, so why now?
AAKRITI KHANAL (she/her/anything respectful) serves as Adhikaar’s Research and Development Coordinator. She’s previously worked as the Special Assistant to the Ambassador of Nepal to the U.S. You can support her and her team at Adhikaar’s efforts to uplift the Nepali-speaking community here. Aakriti cares deeply about labor, immigration and gender issues and is fluent in Nepali, Hindi, English, and Spanish.
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I THINK THAT I've always been aware of being an immigrant. In the beginning, when we were doing our paperwork, whether it's Medicaid or whether it's for school or whatever else, I helped my family through it. They don't have really strong English. I mean, neither did I. I knew that my other Nepali-American friends were doing something similar and it was easy for me to identify with them. Seeing my dad work all the time - like 80 hour weeks - and my mom studying and kind of working their way up the social ladder a little bit, always made me aware of the fact that we were immigrants. We don't come from a lot and my parents are working hard to get to whatever the next level is. Now I think I'm assimilated into American culture, but I still carry parts of me being an immigrant, wherever I go.
My sister and I were both old enough to recognize that our extended family wasn't here. Also in Nepal, we had just built our home, it was our dream home and my parents had chipped in money to complete it. Seeing that and then coming here and not having beds or a proper dining table to eat meals together, until maybe a year and a half into being here, you realize that your parents are really making a sacrifice to be here. But I think part of it is also for themselves, right? One of the things that my mom always tells me is how challenging it was in Nepal to be in the workplace as a woman because it was the constant having to prove that you're worthy enough to be in the room she was in.
With my work at Adhikaar, what I've realized is that privilege is still a thing that exists within an immigrant space. When my family came here, because of the diversity visa program, we were handed social security and green cards right away. Now I'm recognizing how much of a privilege that is. The community that we work with at Adhikaar is very much people that are almost invisible, even within the Nepali community: restaurant workers or chefs or domestic workers, nail salon workers, Uber drivers, people that are in informal sectors. And so for me, as tough as it was, being somebody that comes from a brahmin background, as a daughter of somebody that got a diversity visa, that all comes with such privilege. Whereas there are families that don't have that set of privileges, families that are still struggling, whether it’s with their gender, their ethnic identity, their caste, or class.
I WAS BORN in Nepal, in Kathmandu. Both my mom's side and my dad's side are from a remote village in Nepal. My mom is somebody that really defies norms of patriarchy. Even at a young age, she took care of her siblings, took care of her parents, got arranged married at 16 – and most importantly excelled at school and was determined to continue getting an education. Despite all the challenges, she pursued education and really knew that it was going to be the reason that she could get her family out of poverty.
Even in the 90s, she had a job in the government. And that's not a position that a lot of people, especially women, had back in the day. Still today there are few women in high-level government positions in Nepal. Personally, for me, it was hard to have somebody like a mom person in your life that is so focused on, you know, something other than yourself, but it really allowed her to do amazing things. And she won the diversity visa lottery to come here. When I was 11 years old, we moved to Virginia.
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I WAS BORN in Lautoka in Fiji, and I came to the U.S. as a child in the mid 90s. We came over from Fiji on a lottery visa. Lottery visas are given to countries where there are lower immigration rates to the U.S. People have different background stories, but for me, my parents wouldn't have been considered “highly” skilled immigrants. They both had working experience though. My father has only completed high school, and my mother didn't finish high school in Fiji. The only reason they applied for a lottery visa was because of what was happening in Fiji at that time.
It’s a country run by the military, and we’ve had a lot of military coups that have to do with the ongoing political tensions between the different communities in Fiji, but also our history of colonialism. So in light of that, in the late 80s, a lot of Indo-Fijians were emigrating. Once we got the lottery visa, we came to live in San Bruno, California, which is where a lot of the Indo-Fijians I know tend to settle when they arrive to the U.S., because that’s their first stop. So in the first part of my childhood, I grew up around other Indo-Fijians and Islanders, which was really positive for me.
So I felt the most profound impact when I found community with other folks from South Asia who come from oppressed caste backgrounds. It changed my life because most of the South Asians I grew up with, whether it was in high school or the ones that I met in college, were from upper/oppressor caste backgrounds. When I moved to Boston, I was finally meeting people who are talking about caste violence or how casteism looks in so many different forms. Just meeting other Dalit people and Dalit women really changed my life because I was better able to understand my own history and see why for so long I was having these issues with upper caste South Asians, and my family’s experiences in the context of Fiji as well. Finding the community that I was looking for has really propelled me to do a lot of the things that I'm doing now – and doing well.
I ALWAYS KNEW I was from Fiji, that was very clear. I did not know much about the history of indentured labor, but I would hear stories (which were rare) about some great, great grandparents and how they came to Fiji. I also knew that we had some connection to India. My family strongly identifies as Madraji, which means of South Indian descent in Fiji. So I knew all of that, but it wasn't really talked about so openly, and there’s also so many histories we don’t know much about.
It’s that mentality of we have to work, we have to go to school, they're always trying to work their way out of coming from that history. So that's how I saw it when I was younger. It was only when I was older that I became very determined to learn more about the history and become clear on how I was identifying and even how I was telling the history to other people. Part of this was going to London for grad school. My master's thesis was about intergenerational trauma in the Indo-Fijian community and that’s when I was able to very specifically focus on Fiji and dive into the history very deeply for the first time. It’s also now that I was asking my family members specific questions, and it's getting a bit uncomfortable because we haven't talked about so many things for so long. That’s also when I said, you know what? I want to share this stuff with other people. So I started an Instagram page to share different histories in relation to indentured labour, especially because there are also so many differences depending on your own context.
GROWING UP, my parents used to have parties almost every weekend. It was a working class community, so these were not fancy parties. But it was just a space and time where Indo-Fijians in our community would come together. In fact, there were always people in our home. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and it was me and my sister at the time, along with my grandma and parents, and later on, I had another sister. Plus we always had people that my family were housing, like recent immigrants coming from Fiji or other people who were just like, hey, we needed a place to stay. I think that really formed my sense of community and responsibility to help other people.
> This is something I've also seen in other coolie communities, where when you come from that history, there is definitely a lot of shame attached to it too.
Growing up, when my family moved to the suburbs of Northern California, that was a bit difficult because we were in a very white area. And then on top of that, I faced a lot of pushback and racism from South Asians, and I will specifically say it's Indians who had caste privilege or who came from dominant castes. They really added on to that erasure. It's one thing to explain a history to them, but it’s another to face racism, making fun, the caste system, classism...All of those things were layered onto this and it pushed me into being like, OK, maybe I shouldn't talk about this and just try to fit in where I can. At the time, I didn't understand how casteism was functioning, because in the Fijian context growing up, a lot of people will talk about how we're post-caste, because we're in Fiji, we’re not in India. At the same time, I heard how my family was facing casteism from other Indo-Fijians. So I was getting mixed messages.
> In reality, caste violence was something that was active on the plantations during the colonial time, and has carried over into our present day communities.
And I think I was getting those messages from my family because it was also a survival thing: they were experiencing it, but they were downplaying a lot of the stuff.
TO ME, FIJI IS STILL HOME. When we came to the U.S., my parents tried to go back home for trips and we could only afford to go back every five years. Not going to Fiji for five years is a very long time. A lot would change between trips, and each time we’d come back, my sisters and I would be so sad, we would cry every single night for months because we missed Fiji so much. My parents would console us, but I don’t think I really understood what a big loss that was for me at the time. After my masters, I went back to Fiji by myself for the first time and that’s when I realised how much I belong there. With my mannerisms and the way that I am culturally...Fiji suits me.
Because I have talked about really complicated and personal things, about my history of being a descendant of indentured labor and being a descendant of Tamil coolies, I think my work really has inspired a lot of people. I keep sharing and I keep talking about these things because I can see how it helps other people be a bit more comfortable talking about it openly and question different things in their lives, like: why do people force us to be labeled as Indian or why do they want us to be South Asian so much but not really understand our specific histories, even within a larger history of indentured labor, or appreciate the different backgrounds that we do come from?
> Being messy and complicated and just letting people deal with that, I think that's what I want to be my legacy to be.
ESHA PILLAY (she/her) is a writer whose research focuses on intergenerational traumas among Indo-Fijian communities, the connection between the colonial violence of indentured histories and present-day traumas, and the function of caste violence throughout Girmit. She’s also one half of Bad Fiji Gyals, a collective committed to sharing stories and cultural knowledge to uncover and learn about indentured labour. You can check out Bad Fiji Gyals here and you can explore her other work here.
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I think a big theme throughout everything is that by moving a lot, finding stability has been difficult for me. I've made really great friendships in all of these different places, but now, at this point in time, I find myself being very lonely and isolated. And then on top of that, it's also a pandemic. I’d recently read something about how queerness allowing you to find other possibilities of living while you're trying to survive is something that can give you hope, and that really resonated with me because I really, really believe in hope. So I think for me, sure, there's a level of marginalization with being queer in addition to my other identities. But I do think it has given me a lot of hope, especially during this time in my life when I feel so isolated and so lonely. I can only imagine for a better time, because, hopefully, it's coming.
Of course, once you’re there, there are additional problems, but I do want to go back and live there for a long time. Also, because of the access I’ve had in regards to education, and doing the Bad Fiji Gyals work I do, I think that stuff needs to be taken back to Fiji because that work will only get better there.
Growing up, most of my friends were Desi. I even first met my husband in middle school at one of our Desi friends' houses. I have two older sisters and they've always been very goody two shoes: especially my oldest sister, she’s the ammajaan of the family. And my middle sister just goes with the flow. I was the one who was always like, why aren't we allowed to say this? Why can’t I go here?
WHEN I STARTED getting involved in politics, my parents were concerned. Being Muslim and especially being a Muslim woman, no one talks about politics. Everyone’s just kind of like, no, let's not get involved in that.
And so when I got involved in the Bernie campaign, my dad was like, he's going to lose. This isn't going to go anywhere. You know, your sisters studied engineering and science, they’re starting their own companies. What are you doing? And I just told him, this is something I really, really care about. I need to try it.
> Not because we don't care about what's happening politically, but because politicians and the media just talk about us in such a certain way that getting involved was kind of like putting yourself into a trap.
When I graduated, I had a job offer at MetLife, and I asked them to push back my start date so I could go to South Carolina to work on the Bernie campaign. This was the first time any of my parents’ daughters was moving out and so it took them a long time to get used to it. Every single day they'd be calling me. How is it? What's going on? Are you OK? I think you should come back. It took them a while to get used to it, but now they've become my biggest supporters and they love doing everything with me. And it's funny because white people aren't used to that. They aren't used to your family being at every event cheering you on and just being there all the time.
What also drew me to politics was carrying on the legacy of my friends. I don't want to let their parents down and I want them to see that their daughters’ legacy of service is still being continued, that their names haven’t been forgotten, that people still remember their story, how they lived their lives, how they practiced, how they were proud Muslim Americans.
My DAD IS from Madras, India and my mom is from Karachi in Pakistan. I was born in Canada, which is where they met. When I was five years old, my dad got a job offer in North Carolina and they packed up and moved. I was raised in Raleigh, and then, when it came time to move out of my parent's home, I decided to move to Durham because that's where I wanted to start my family.
I WAS STILL in college in February 2015 when my three friends, Deah, Yusor and Razan, were murdered in the Chapel Hill shooting. Deah and Yusor had gotten married just seven weeks before. Yusor’s sister Razan had gone over for dinner when their neighbor had come and murdered them in their home. It was a hate crime. The incident occurred because Yusor was visibly Muslim, she wore the hijab, Razan wore the the hijab. And the way that the media responded was saying it was over a parking dispute. That you could take their lives and push it into something so minimal and say that they were murdered over a parking spot really just filled us with so much anger. It took their families having to continuously say, my kids were not taking over a parking spot, for some media to start using the right narrative. But now it's at the point where if anyone hears about the Chapel Hill shooting, they'll be like, oh, yeah, that's the one about the parking spot, right? The damage was done. And so that really is what drove me.
> Realising that this is how society sees us and that we're just dispensable to them. I wanted to see change in the way that Muslims are talked about. Whenever there's a terrorist
incident, Muslims are always the first ones to be blamed and then we're all expected to apologize for it.
I REMEMBER THE first day I got to South Carolina, I went to a Chick-fil-A because I needed to get lunch. I walked into the restaurant and everyone stopped eating and turned around and just stared at me. And I was like, I don't know what to do, so I quickly got my food. And I went and I ate in my car because I was like, I don't even feel comfortable sitting in there. And it was constant experiences like that. I would have to go door to door to talk to voters and I had to do it alone, and a lot of these people had never seen a Muslim person before, I’d get chased out of their yards, get cursed at.
While running for a seat on the Durham County Board of Commissioners, one thing I always thought about is that despite having figures like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar as inspiration, I couldn’t model my campaign after them. In North Carolina, it's a different ball game, we're in the South. I have to go through the hurdles of Confederacy, people sending me messages, telling me to go back to where I came from. One thing I do hope to see is that my campaign becomes an example for other Muslim women who want to run in North Carolina or even other Southern states, the strategies that we used, how to effectively get our messaging out there, how to build relationships with different community groups.
BEING THE FIRST Muslim woman to be elected to any office in North Carolina, I don’t want to be tokenised. For people to say, oh we're so diverse, we elected the first Muslim woman. Like, yes, it's something to celebrate, but also, why did it take so long to reach this point?
> Why has it taken us so long in the entire state of North Carolina, at any level of elected office? Why did you not see me or women like me capable or qualified enough before this point?
It’s also a lot of pressure, because people need that support and representation from you. Being a representative of the Muslim community, of Muslim women, of South Asians, everyone looks to me like oh, is that what other South Asian or other Muslim women are going to do?
A LOT OF people still question me regarding my faith. I recently got asked if my religion is going to influence my policy and decision making. I told that person, honestly, I hope so. Because for me, my religion teaches me that if your neighbor doesn't have food on their table, it's your responsibility to do something about it. Either you take some food over to them or find the systems that are in place that are keeping food off their table and tear them down. So for me, that stems from my religion, the value of a human life, the value of taking care of someone comes from the morals my parents raised me with. So, yes, I do hope that I lead with my morals.
NIDA ALLAM (she/her) has been a grassroots organiser since high school. In 2017, she was elected as 3rd Vice Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party and in 2018, she was unanimously elected as Chair of the Durham Mayor’s Council for Women. In 2020, she was elected to the Durham County Board of Commissioners, becoming the first Muslim woman to hold public office in North Carolina. You can follow and support the work she’s doing to uplift her community here.
Tw: hate crime, violence, murder
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she/her
they/them
I GREW UP in a rural South Carolina setting. I was one of three South Asian students in my school, which included my brother, and there was just a noticeable lack in my life of other young South Asians, period. I had definitely found friends, but I couldn't get the kind of support that was like, I know how you feel, I understand. Publishing things as Diaspoura was the way I could break through the fear and shame that I had from dealing with those issues on my own. And I think that really resonated with a lot of other people who are experiencing isolation around certain cultural phenomena, something they were feeling was only affecting themselves.
When I first released Diaspoura and I was coming up, the primary offers I was receiving were all based around certain marginalized identities that I have. At the time, I was not outwardly non-binary, so it was women-centered events, it was South Asian community events or queer playlists. And I'm glad to be witnessed and supported in my identities like that. But then when I was asked for interviews regarding my identities, it was giving me a different experience: it was always, always just making me relive the most terrible realities that I was still living in, and talking about how much I suffer with this thing and then this thing and then this thing...And I think being someone who is othered with my race, sexuality, gender, disability...it just became so clear what was happening to me, that I was just this living character who embodies all of these oppressed traits, and that I'm living to talk about suffering.
And I was like –
How can I not suffer? Can anybody tell me how I can not suffer?
> Do I
have to
live and
breathe
suffering to
exist and
be
recognized?
This is one part of my understanding of liberation now: the transformation of victims to survivors and asking them how they're surviving and how they can be supported.
SO I STARTED my Patreon as a call to my friends to directly support me instead of me transitioning into a label or receiving sponsorships that could pay for my music. I started getting those offers, and it felt really grimy to feel like I had to do this secret business and then cover it up so that it looks like I'm this self-sustained and successful artist who came up from the trenches. So my Patreon was a way for me to say, hey, I'm willing to be completely transparent about everyone I'm working with, how intentional everything is...Can you just help me get a living wage to keep making music in a really honest way?
My community is still holding this space for my art – it’s such a beautiful feeling to be loved this way by this constellation of amazing people in my life. This is the biggest thing that has helped me survive up to this point. Also knowing what exactly I need and accepting that I'm not a capitalist and that I don't strive to live in wealth and excess. So how can my community provide and how can I reciprocate so that we all have our basic needs met?
Another grassroots strategy I have is horizontally booking with people. I've led a couple of tours where we've co-headlined the tour, instead of there being a big name headliner and then there being smaller, assistant artists that get to benefit from the big name and whatnot. And then along with booking, I've done a lot of advocacy with bookers to be like, hey, can we make the payout process really transparent? How much are other artists getting paid? Can you afford to pay us a liveable wage and then cut budgets in other ways?
My vision when I was creating Traumaporn was being in a place of affirming queer and trans people of color. We have each other, we're well connected. We love each other. We're not going to keep participating in your systems that are not serving us.
It was also about having people like us not only on the screen, but also in the credits. We were starting to see people who looked like us on screen, but then we'd look at the credits and then see all of these white guys with all of the filming and directing roles. And it's like this doesn't even feel like our story anymore. This seems like a portrayal of how they see us versus how we see ourselves.
There are also parts of my South Asian identity that make me feel pained and confused, particularly all the things that I've been brought up with that were narratives to make me feel complacent or closeted or impure. Coming from a Gujarati, dominant caste background and seeing how caste has really infiltrated into a lot of cultural norms has made me rethink a lot of things and see how I can accept myself, while not priding myself on things I'm not proud of. For instance, I don't have to acknowledge or celebrate Diwali, and that doesn't make me any less South Asian, especially because there's tons of people who are being oppressed by Hindus in India and everywhere.
MY RELATIONSHIP TO my South Asian identity is absolutely complex. There are some things that I appreciate, like images, objects, memories, smells, because I think aesthetically I take so much from my South Asian upbringing and culture. Even the things that my parents would listen to around the house, I’ve subconsciously brought that into my music now.
I guess I've put a lot of fixation on my parents' support because I feel a limited amount of mentorship in my life and exposure to my culture and my ancestors, and because I don't talk to the rest of my family. My parents have come some ways, I think. I have recently been more publicly polyamorous, and I told my parents about how I have two partners right now who know and like each other. It was definitely hard for them, but a couple of weeks ago, one of my partners was driving me to the airport to see my other partner. I told that to my mom and she said to say hi to both of them. And just her acknowledgment was huge for me. I was like, well, yeah, you're accepting the fact that this is a normal life.
I personally believe that just representation is not going to liberate me or people like me. I think it's really important for all of us to think about what kind of representation are these people giving us. What kind of representation are we looking for? And for me, I’m looking for representation where queer people are not having to boil ourselves down to our fashion and creating character tropes about ourselves. Representation of people working cooperatively together.
> I'm looking for representation of authentic people living liberating
and humble lives.
ANJALI (they/them) is the radical force behind DIASPOURA, creating art, music, and community. Diaspoura's sound and speech has brought forth a fresh perspective to the media of a poor, Brown, and gay South. Their most recent EP Traumaporn (2018) is a sonic study of power and vulnerability. You can support them and their practice here and you can follow their journey here.
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> We're going to set the standard and you have to follow.
IF MY LIFE was a movie, it would be a travelling movie. You know how people usually have childhood friends and best friends because they grew up together? I never had that because I was always moving from one place to another – India, Nepal, New York. I’m Tibetan, so we had to move around a lot. I travelled around India, went back and forth to Nepal then came to New York.
Tibetan culture and the religion is very intertwined, because Buddhism is like a way of life and it really influences our culture. My grandmother was Bhutanese, but she spoke Tibetan in our household. We’d speak three or four different languages at home, including English. I also speak Sharchokpa, one of the dialects of Bhutan. Growing up in India, Nepali was around me, and so I speak it too.
IN INDIA, we have refugee settlements. I never grew up in that strong-knit Tibetan community, but when I was in the fourth grade, I lived for a year in a Tibetan settlement. And that’s when I was introduced to the political part of Tibet, of being a refugee. We went to the March 10th protest, which is a big deal because it's the uprising in Tibet. I still remember those chants, but I guess at the time, you don't know what it means, right? I mean, even though you know the words, are you really feeling it? I didn’t know what it meant until I came to New York. That's when the Tibetan identity became stronger, I would say, because I went to a Tibetan Sunday school and I went to the Students for Free Tibet summer camp. The activist part of me started from there.
In New York, I went to Newcomers high school, which is an immigrant high school where everybody is new to the country. So it was there when people were like, oh, I'm from this country, I'm from that country. And then I would be like, I’m Tibetan, but I grew up in India and Nepal. I always make sure that I say I'm from Tibet, even though saying that means I have to explain a lot. Some people haven't heard of Tibet. Some people say, oh, this is China and some people say oh, the Dalai Lama.
> I have to make that effort to explain and it's not easy.
In larger spaces, I always feel drawn to an Indian person or a Nepali person, I'm like, okay, I can connect. But I realized that their experience of being Indian or Nepali is very different. I feel really Desi, because I really love Bollywood and Indian culture, but when I was asking my other Tibetan friends, I realized that they don't feel that way. Even though they grew up in India, they feel more connected to the culture here (in the US). So that's when I started to question my identity because I started having these questions, like am I supposed to be part of this culture or these spaces?
This could be because as Tibetans, we do not really have a home, our identity in itself is questionable to a lot of people. The most time I've spent in one country or one place is in New York City, but I still don't feel like I am a New Yorker or an American. In India, I always get the stare. People stare at me because I look different. They call us chinky, and when I go and speak Hindi with them, they get shocked. Even though I haven’t spent that much time in Nepal, I feel more connected or safer there. In 2015 after the earthquake, I left my job and I went back to Nepal, just to see how I can help. I was there for eight months, volunteering. I came back, stayed six months, and then went back again. There’s a tie that pulls me back.
> The definition of home is still very unclear for me.
IT'S IMPORTANT FOR MYSELF, my identity, to know where my ancestors came from and what struggles they had, because my mom and my grandmother didn't know how to deal with their traumas. And because of that, they pass that on to us in a way. So I am trying to take a conscious decision of being aware of how to deal with those traumas so that I don't pass it on to the next generation. And the biggest thing I did was go to therapy. Even though I talk about mental health a lot, I never got myself to do it.
> It took a long time for me to get there, but I finally started it. I think understanding where my family came from will be really helpful to heal.
TENYING YANGSEL (she/her) is a housing counselor at Chhaya CDC, a non-profit that addresses the housing and economic needs of working class South Asian and Indo-Caribbean New Yorkers. She’s also an adviser at Drokpo, a youth-led organisation that supports the Himalayan community in Nepal. Tenying is a dancer and loves Bollywood, Nepali and Tibetan dance forms.
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SINCE BEING IN New York, I was very focused on the political part of the Tibetan identity, but then recently I decided to take a break from it, even though being a Tibetan in itself is a very political thing. Now I'm more into the social aspect and I'm trying to see how I can help the community in that way. I got more interested in mental health because I was working with the Survivors of Torture program. The importance of mental health became clear to me and how it is not so prominent in our culture.
she/her
I WAS BORN in Kansas City, Kansas, but I spent most of my life in St. Louis with the Sunni Muslim community of Greater St. Louis. There were a lot of different people, but it was Arab and Indian-Pakistani dominated. There were not too many Bengalis who frequented the masjid, but there was a Bengali community in St. Louis that I have faint memories of interacting with. My mom became a lot more religious when she came to the States, and when I was maybe seven or eight, she started moving away from Bengalis and towards a pan-Muslim masjid community. I did hear a lot of, oh, the other Bengalis are not bad people, but they listen to music or don’t wear a hijab...They don't follow what our religion says. And so I grew up with that mentality of strict Islam.
I did not grow up listening to music at all. So now, I have a lot of friends my age who’ll refer to “That Lipgloss Song” and I’m like, I’ve never heard that in my life. Because my mom very staunchly said, music is haram, it’s the voice of the devil and you can't listen to it. These teachings weren't all from her. They were also from other Muslim teachers at the masjid, or from the imams. And so I would get all these pieces to put together this notion of mainstream Islam. I didn't really question it because I also had my own convictions and I felt, if I’m on the path of truth, even if I'm missing out on something like music, it's not really that important. So that was what sustained me for so, so, so much of my life. From fifth to seventh grade, I was homeschooled and I did a full-time memorization of the Quran. And on March 3rd, 2009, I officially memorized the Quran and was given the title of Hafiza.
> I was relieved because I could put a name to this feeling that I had felt before, but then immediately after, I was really, really scared and really, really angry.
A couple of months in, the shooting of Michael Brown happened in Ferguson, Missouri, a 20-minute drive away from my campus, and in the wake of that, there were a lot of people protesting on campus and around the city. But for me, there was this gap in understanding. I felt, yeah, I'm Brown. I've also been racially profiled. And as long as I'm respectful to the police officers, I've always been safe. But once these protests started, I would go and put myself in these places where I didn't agree with these Black voices speaking, but I would shut up and listen to them. And I would take in the points they were making and think about it more and more, and by the end of sophomore year, I was pretty solid in my understanding of how systemic racism works, and why I need to be active in fighting it.
I just felt, Allah, why did you make me this way if you don't think I should be this way? Because what I was taught from most of the Muslim community was that being gay was a sin. It felt unfair. I asked God, why are you testing me like this? I became suicidal, honestly, because I didn't have anyone to share these feelings with. If I shared it with people at public school who were white, they would say, you're gay, that’s fine, go ahead and do that. And then if I told it to anyone in the Muslim community, they'd just gossip and the whole world would know in two days. And on top of the gossip, I would be judged and told exactly what I already knew, that I’m going to hell. So I was between a rock and a hard spot for a long time. And that's when I was really suicidal.
I eventually found one friend who I commuted to some college classes with. He was very emotionally aware and so I felt really safe to come out to him. I said, hey, I'm gay, but you're also Muslim. And you know how much I am a practicing Muslim and I just don't know how to reconcile this. And he said – dang, that's hard, I'm so sorry you have to go through that. These were very simple things but I needed to hear them so profoundly. Over time, I fleshed out an idea, with just him, with no outside people knowing: I can be gay if I don't act on it and if I act on it, I can always seek forgiveness. Act on it meaning having gay sex. So going into college, that’s how I came to a place where...it wasn't good, but it was stable enough for me not to be actively suicidal.
BEGINNING OF 2016, I was pseudo-dating someone called Rox. He was my math tutor, but we ended up talking a lot about queerness, but also religion and also the math homework…but also not the math homework. So one day I asked him to take acid with me. And what happened on this trip was I tried to convert him to Islam.
I said –
And his response was –
> That's not going to happen.
> I love you and because I love you, I want you to become Muslim.
I announced it on Facebook. That did not go over well because I was a highly esteemed religious figure in the St. Louis Muslim community. I counted over a hundred texts and missed calls and messages from the community. Eventually, one other conservative Muslim family that I knew in St. Louis picked me up. Once I was 90 percent of the way sober, I told the family about my conversation with Rox, and finally, aunty says, arre, who is this Rox person? I just said, he's my boyfriend. And that’s how I came out of the closet.
Once that happened, people started to treat me differently. They started asking these homophobic-rooted questions, like: now that you're gay, can you still lead prayer? Or: will our prayers be accepted if you lead prayer? I didn't really know what to do with that, but I did go to a Muslims Students Association event that was attended by Muslims from across the Midwest. I had decided to perform spoken word at the event, and so I was writing several different poems. But the one that was the most...juicy or heartfelt was one about coming out. So essentially, I came out of the closet again on stage performing spoken word in Knoxville, Tennessee, in front of a crowd of hundreds of MSA and Muslim community members.
And then we started having a discussion about God. And when we were talking about this, I felt like I was looking into a mirror. So here is my body, here is my entire understanding of the existence of God and Islam. But my reflection is, in fact, Rox and all of his ideas: that there is no God, there's only these other rules of chaos and physics and chemistry and biology staring back. So it felt like two different perspectives on the same reality. And that made me believe that, wow, there must be no God. Or rather whether or not God exists is moot. So that night, while still tripping on acid, I came out as an atheist.
Afterwords, some people came up to me and said, that was incredible, thank you so much for being vulnerable. Other people said, you really shouldn't have done that. And in fact, the organizers issued a formal apology for allowing me to perform that piece. So I got mixed reactions, but what’s important is that’s how I got connected to a Facebook group that had other queer Muslims.
> They were the first other queer Muslims I had ever known to exist, and I realized, whoa, I'm not the only one.
And that's also where I learned about the book Homosexuality in Islam by Dr. Scott Kugle. It really deconstructs a lot of the the arguments that Muslims use to say homophobia is in the Quran. And it's not. And in this book, he goes specifically into the verses from the Quran in Arabic. Of course I already knew the verses by heart, and so all of his arguments made crystal clear sense. It was just a mind-blowing experience to be validated for something that I knew deep down, but didn't see anyone around me affirming. So that group gave me that social realization and that book gave me the theological realization. And then the Muslim Youth Leadership Council and El-Tawhid Juma Circle, which is the masjid where I currently have a spiritual home, gave me a community.
A COUPLE OF MONTHS after I took acid, I applied to be a resident assistant on campus, and the reason for that was because after coming out of the closet to my mom, she would take out all of her anger and unprocessed emotions directly onto me. I didn’t have any room to escape that and so I was looking for way out. Once I got the position, I was so relieved, I was counting down the days until I could move in. When that day came, I felt so peaceful because I felt, wow, I finally have a chance at being myself. Also, my boss was queer. And this was really big because not only was he my boss at the workplace, he was also in charge of my living space. So I knew I could come out as queer and I could be myself. And just live and just exist for once.
And so that’s when I started thinking about how I consider myself a man who wants to be an ally to women. But because I am a man, I have not experienced what it is like to live as a woman, and therefore I don't really have an understanding of how patriarchy affects women. And so I decided I was going to start an experiment: I'm going to dress like a woman. I'm just going to exist as a woman almost to gain proximity to womanhood, to learn what it's like to be a victim of patriarchy so that I can become a better ally. But once I started this experiment, I said, this doesn't feel like an experiment, it feels natural, which is not what I expected. And that was strange and scary. So I looked into it – again the theme of shut up and listen. So I just listened to a lot of trans people speak about their experiences and I thought, dang, that's it, isn't it? I'm trans, I just didn't know it. I’d been out as a woman, but I hadn’t been out as trans.
I had already lost so many MSA friends for coming out as gay and then when I came out as trans, almost everyone from the MSA stopped associating with me. So I experienced this kind of social death and that was really hard. But I gained so much more than what I lost. I gained the freedom to be myself for one. I also gained so many new friends. I got to meet other queer Muslims in real life as well, which was mind-blowing. I also became interested in my Bengali roots, and recently, living in Minneapolis, a couple of my childhood Bangla friends reached out to me. And meeting them felt so good. I just thought, all of you are Bengali, I can speak Bangla with you. And none of you are judging me for being trans. So I finally found that sort of group I was searching for.
I think my faith informs my queerness and that my queerness informs my faith. That book Homosexuality in Islam was written with the framework of liberation theology, and a lot of the campus ministry people that I associated with after coming out were queer people who were highly spiritual, and also spoke of liberation theology. And so, I was meeting all of these different people who were practicing liberation theology and that really inspired me to feel: wow, my life as a trans Muslim matters. And not only does it matter, it gives me wisdom and insights on what the point of faith is.
> I don't think that if I divorce myself of one of them, my faith or my queerness, that I can actually have the other.
she/her
Tw: mention of suicidal ideation
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A tree takes decades to grow, it takes care and nurturing, and none of those things are happening when the world is is ending. But the Prophet still tells us to plant that seed. And I think we as individuals should always be doing whatever is in our immediate capability to make the future a better place. I will not be asked about the entire America, whether or not it falls to fascism, but I will be asked what I did to help my neighbor who is going through a tough time. So whatever is in my scope, that is where I want to make a difference.
I WANT TO give back in a way that is perhaps remembered, but really the remembrance is not as important as that I actually provide material or theological or spiritual help to people around me. Imagine the day of judgment as described in the Quran: that the sky is being split apart. The mountains have been ripped open and are floating around like pieces of cotton. The entire world is just utter chaos. The Prophet says if the day of judgment is already here, but in your hand you have a seed of a tree, plant it.
AMEERA KHAN (she/her) joined the Muslim Youth Leadership Council (MYLC) as a youth activist in 2018, and has helped create resources and networks for LGBTQ+ Muslim youth and their allies. She’s also committed to supporting the work MyLC does to counter Islamophobia, strengthen sexual health and reproductive rights for young Muslims, and fight racial injustice. You can follow her work on Instagram or Facebook.
THE FIRST MINOR crack – I wouldn't even call it a crack, but it was sort of setting the stage for my future evolution – was me falling in love in high school with an underclassman named John (name changed for privacy). It was head over heels love, and I thought, whoa, what is this? I didn't admit to myself that it was love. I asked him one day, can we do the science fair together? And he said, you don't really want to do the science fair, you just want to be around me because you're in love with me. You’re gay. And I was like, no, I'm not. Then I went home, laid down on my bed, staring at the ceiling, and I thought about it and went, oh shoot, I AM gay. That was the first thing that really shook my understanding of who I was and how I existed in this world and divine order.
> In college,
a theme
was to
just
challenge
myself.
she/her
I GREW UP identifying as Sri Lankan Tamil. And I think part of it was just that Sri Lanka is the country that my parents immigrated from. And in the US, when we’re talking about ‘where are you from’, typically we’re being asked, what country did you immigrate from. I think also identifying as Sri Lankan Tamil was partly about being conscious of the fact that there are different Tamil identities and communities in places other than Sri Lanka. But over time, I started changing how I was looking at my identity, and I stopped identifying as Sri Lankan Tamil and started to identify as a Tamil person whose family immigrated from Sri Lanka. I now identify with the more specific term "Eelam Tamil."
The term Sri Lankan has been used in a very politicized way in Sri Lanka to refer to a national identity that is somehow supposed to transcend ethnic groups and religious identities, while decades and decades of successive Sinhalese-Buddhist governments have engaged in very disparate treatment of different groups, whether we're talking about Tamils, Muslims, or other oppressed peoples on the island. But of course many of us in diaspora take different positions on this same thing. I have Tamil friends who say, I see where you're coming from, but that's not how I feel.
MY PARENTS, like a lot of my peers whose parents immigrated to the US in the 1970s, definitely come from a background where they had the capacity and the privilege to be able to choose to leave Sri Lanka. It was in my teenage years that I really started having more direct conversations with them about Sri Lanka and why they left. That’s when they started sharing more with me about the history of the country and basically their fears for what might happen there. I already had an interest in human rights issues. But then to hear more of how these issues are related to our own community, to our own relatives, that moved me, and I got more involved in advocacy work around the time of the end of the armed conflict in 2009.
I’ve had this conversation with some elders over the years, like why do you have to do this stuff? Why don’t you just let it be? You don’t even live there, you don’t have to concern yourself with it.
> But I really do think that if we are in a position where we don't have to have as many fears over our safety, those of us who are willing to speak out and do the work, it's important to.
THROUGHOUT MY ADULT LIFE, I definitely believed in that whole idea of if you don't come out, you're doing something wrong, you're being ashamed of yourself, or you should be embarrassed. I think this is part of my old-school sociocultural upbringing, but I really bought into that narrative for a long time. What flipped that for me was hearing about the idea of 'inviting in' being the terminology rather than 'coming out.' This is terminology I learned from young queer Tamils in diaspora.
It was conceived by the scholar Darnell Moore, who also credits Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett, and between their writings, they talk about inviting in not being an all or nothing activity you engage in, but that you choose if you want to invite anyone into that particular fact about yourself. That really spoke to me. That's not to say that there's something wrong with coming out, but I also think there are reasons of physical and mental safety that might make someone not want to invite everyone in their lives into their queerness.
I WAS WRITING a lot of poetry when I was in university, but then I stopped writing for years. In 2009, between the trauma of what was happening in Sri Lanka and my own personal life here in DC, I started going to poetry readings and slam poetry events. And one of the things that really struck me about slam poetry was how someone could get up on the stage and in three minutes have strangers in the audience completely moved and torn up. So I started competing. With everything I was sort of coming to that space with, I just felt like there’s one way of using language – writing press releases and presentations and drafting the perfect language for this letter that's being sent to an official entity – and there is also this other way:
> You can still be talking about very factual, real things, without making it sterilized or unemotional in order to be taken seriously.
One of my poems that talks about the end of the armed conflict in Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan government's genocide started as a slam poem. After performing that poem, I’ve had people come up to me and say, I care about the treatment of marginalized groups, this is a thing I've never heard anything about, but now that I've heard you talk about it, I want to know more.
I would like my creative work to do as much work as it can while I'm here, and I would want it to live on after I'm gone. And at the same time, I would really hope that some of it's not nearly as relevant in 10 years as it is right now. I think of the word legacy as meaning after you're dead, but if legacy can be something that also walks alongside of us while we're still here, I would hope to be contributing and expanding on these narratives of what it means to be part of the LGBTQ+ community while also being part of the Tamil community.
GOWRI K (she/her) is a writer, performing artist, and lawyer whose advocacy has addressed animal welfare, the environment, the rights of prisoners and the criminally accused in the U.S., and justice and accountability in Sri Lanka. You can explore her work here.
In terms of the evolution of my queerness, for decades of my life, the way I'd look at it is I didn't know that I was queer. Then for decades, I was fully aware of it, but I didn't talk about it with anyone except for a couple of people. And then over the past 5-10 years was when I really started feeling more comfortable, slowly, publicly identifying myself as queer. I didn't start navigating my queerness in Tamil spaces until maybe five years ago. These were typically activist, advocacy, and art spaces, and then family spaces.
In terms of family spaces and extended family, certainly there may very well be relatives of mine who don't love this fact about me, but nobody has told me that, and in fact, some relatives have even surprised me. However, it is important to me to specify that by the time I was doing this stuff in my family, I was already in my forties. I was worried about harming my relationship with my relatives that I was closest with, but beyond that, there wouldn’t be any sort of other major fallout. The stakes would have been quite different for me if I was 19 or 20.
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WHEN I WAS younger, being born and raised in diaspora, I felt like I'm less Tamil than my cousins who grew up there, and maybe less Tamil than some of my peers. As a I grew older, I felt like I wasn't necessarily doing the things that uphold the Tamil culture, like marrying a Tamil person, having children, teaching them about our heritage, etc. This is certainly not an unusual expectation for lots of women and girls from many different communities. Now I'm forty-five years old. I'm a fully middle-aged woman. I've never been married. I've never had children. I have told my relatives that I'm queer. I have introduced my partner, who is white, to a lot of them.
> And I certainly don't feel like any of that stuff makes me less Tamil. I think that there is so much diversity within any identity group.
she/her
MY PARENTS ARE originally from what is now Pakistan. They are Punjabi – they are from Lahore and Rawalpindi respectively, and during partition, they relocated to India. When he was in his 20s, my father moved to East Africa to be a schoolteacher in a rural part of Tanzania. He then later went to India, had an arranged marriage with my mother, and then moved back to Tanzania. That’s where I was born.
I grew up in Tanzania until I was about 12 years old, and during that time, in the late 70s, there was a huge anti-Indian, anti-Asian sentiment that was sweeping through East Africa. Many of the other South Asians decided to relocate to Canada, the UK, and so on, but my father had always said, I’m going to be buried in Africa. Though we carried Indian passports, we considered ourselves as Tanzanians. And so, when everyone was fleeing for their lives, we relocated to Botswana, where I was brought up. My mother, my brother and his family still reside there.
Ironically, I came to the States for college and I’m still here. I now live on the sacred lands of the Muskogee Creek (Atlanta) with my partner Charles and my children. Charles and I were very intentional about where we wanted to raise our children because they’re biracial – they’re Black-Brown-Desi. We wanted someplace where they’d feel a sense of 'I’m from here’ and so we chose Atlanta.
> If there's one thing that I've struggled with all my life it's this notion of belonging. I'm now in my forties and I'm finally coming to terms with it.
I didn’t belong in India – my Indian relatives and acquaintances meant really well but they’d make fun of the way we spoke Hindi. Even though my parents very much saw themselves as Indian, I didn’t – because I was growing up around Black people and I was the only Brown person in my class. And to me, my sense was that I was just...different, I couldn’t have the words to explain it. Even when I was in college, there were a lot of affinity groups around me, but I didn’t fit in with any of them. I didn’t fit in with the South Asian student groups because I wasn’t from South Asia. The African Student’s Association was all Black people, and I didn’t believe in taking space there.
Now I’m raising South Asian and Black children in the US and it can be heart-wrenching. What I know is that children do make sense of the world. Whether or not we as parents or educators want to talk to children about what’s happening, they perceive it. And if we don’t give them the tools to talk about it and process it, they’ll fill in the blanks with misinformation.
> My dad would say I'm going to raise my children in Africa, and not in America.
ANOTHER REASON I feel like I’m an outsider amongst South Asians is because the majority of the Brown girls I grew up with didn’t marry outside their race, in fact, they stayed within their caste. That’s another part of why I am a reluctant South Asian. Because part of our culture ends up being very prejudiced. Many people in my family itself don’t associate with me, partly going back to what they see as cultural norms I violated when I married a Black man. When we asked for permission to marry, while my parents embraced Charles and his son, many of my extended relatives were displeased with that and didn’t allow their daughters to attend our wedding.
This interview has been compiled from episodes 4 and 5 of the Desi Woman Diaspora podcast, co-created by Mala Kumar and Kiran Kumar, along with supplementary conversations with Gayatri.
GAYATRI SETHI (she/her) is a writer and educator. Her upcoming book Un/belonging from Mango and Marigold Press is an illustrated compilation of verse-like reflections about identity, intercultural anti-Blackness and the South Asian diaspora. You can find more of her work and thoughts here.
> So that's kind of how I've raised them, I talk about these things, and give them a framing, but it's heart-wrenching because very often these conversations are challenging. But we keep showing up to them.
As South Asians, we often miss out on understanding the layered identities that we have. For many of us who are growing up now, we have those push and pull identities and we are forced to pick one of them. I’m a diasporic desi of Punjabi descent with Sikh and Hindu ancestors raised in interfaith Baha’i communities, now married to a Black person who was raised Christian and worshipped with Sufi Muslims when we met.
I’VE RECLAIMED MY Desi-ness by putting it in a larger identity framework that includes race, faith, caste, and class. I have stopped seeking acceptance in South Asian spaces. I have decided that I am a disruptive desi and whether it’s in the US South or visiting relatives in Delhi, I’m not going to fit in or belong. I have truly embraced that my very existence is disruptive to those overly invested in caste or race-based identity policing, and that I’ll continue to seek belonging within rather than outside of myself.
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she/they
I LIVED A chunk of my life with distant relatives who were extremely wealthy but very abusive as well. I have this very distinct memory where my mom and I would sneak out of the house to go to a local movie theater. And when we came home, we would burn the movie tickets because we didn't want our relatives to find them. And I think that was when I truly realized what it's like to be under surveillance and to be controlled. Because when I look back at it now, I’m like, all we were doing is watching movies. And I think that's also why media is so powerful for me, because my mom I would watch movies and talk shows together – for instance, we would watch Oprah together everyday – but we had to be so careful.
> All throughout my life, I've always been under surveillance, whether it was by men in my family or even other Muslim girls my age, teachers, even people younger than me.
I went to an all-girls public high school: it was a predominantly South Asian school, predominantly Pakistani and Muslim, and it was extremely homophobic. And I think that's also where I started to realize my queer identity because when I was hearing them say really horrible homophobic things, even though I didn't know what queerness was, it would hurt me. And I was like, why is it hurting me? Am I one of those people they're talking about? Later on, I started to meet more queer people. For instance, one of my ex-best friends was the first ever queer Muslim person I met and I remember her being so proud about it. And that's what made me realize who I am.
And so I had to be absent for a few days. I didn't tell my parents because I was scared. That experience made me realize I couldn't express myself, but it also fueled this fire inside of me, that one day when I'm safe, I would never let people control me. Their hate actually fueled me to want to find myself more. After high school, I came out to the world, even though I did receive a lot of backlash and that was really scary.
I’M STILL PROCESSING my gender identity. The thing that's really beautiful about gender is that there's so many forms and there's no one gender, I believe. Labels can be extremely powerful, obviously. But I also do think that gender and sexuality is so spiritual and it’s always fluid, changing, and infinite.
I THINK I'VE always had a really hard relationship with faith: from early on, distant relatives would use it as a tool to control me. I was never really taught that God is merciful. What I always heard was, you're going to hell or something is haram. I still don't really know much about Islam, other than what's haram. I think that really built a lot of turmoil inside of me, up until college.
And especially with my queer identity, I just felt so much shame. But now, years later, I’m seeing so many wonderful queer Muslims and seeing how religious they are. Because I always thought that in order to be queer, you need to strip yourself of your faith, your culture, and traditions. But I realize now that I can reclaim my religion on my own terms. So I've been really trying to learn and teach myself and just unlearn as much as I can.
> Like people would say Insha'Allah to me and I would feel nauseous, because I would just go back to my childhood self where I was afraid of religion because I thought I was going to hell.
Growing up in and around Kensington, which is a neighborhood with one of the largest Bangladeshi demographics in Brooklyn, I didn't really realize I was a child of an immigrant household because everyone around me was a child of an immigrant household. I actually thought it was the norm, and I didn't really meet white Americans until college. I look back now and I see how my family has tried so hard to assimilate. I remember my mom would always carry a dictionary and that she would look through my homework, not only to help me, but because she wanted to learn. Now she has super fluent English, but it makes me sad because I don't really know Bangla well.
I think my mom just accidentally didn't get to teach me Bangla because she was so busy trying to teach herself so many things in order to survive. And I think that’s why I didn't know much about the culture. I had to find out things for myself: I had to sit down and research about Bengali holidays and the Liberation War because no one really taught it to me. My parents were working all the time, they were on survival mode. I'm also now seeing that being lower income really has laid the foundation for my life. It is part of my identity. It's part of my life. It's part of how I move through the world and it also influences my political views like Marxism and abolition.
BECAUSE OF MY WRITING, people have told me, wow, you seem really close to your parents. And I didn't really know that until it was brought to my attention, because as a teenager, I had a very rocky relationship with them. I think the reason why I'm really close to them is because the trauma that we all went through collectively, whether it was distant family members or assimilating in America in poverty, has kind of forced us to be close to each other. And the reason I’m really close to my mom especially was because the year after my senior year of high school, she fell really sick and I remember having to take her back and forth to the hospital. And when you're caring for someone as a child, you just see everything so differently now. Now during the pandemic, I live at home, and learning more about their pain has made me see them as human rather than just the people who brought me to this world.
I’m realizing that they too have their own dreams and wants and desires. And the thing is, I also have desires and wants that they won't necessarily understand. So it's been really beautiful to know them, but also extremely painful too, because it's like where do my desires play in all of this? For instance, with my queerness, now that I'm home with my parents it’s really complicated, because I'm not out to them. I find myself internalizing a lot of homophobia while also becoming more comfortable in my body and wanting to research more. And I think that's what happens when you're in a place where you're not allowed to express yourself. You find yourself wanting more and more, and wanting to learn more. So I've been watching movies nonstop with lesbians or queer people, but at the same time kind of indulging in self-pity because my parents are very homophobic.
Once I was 18, I started going to events in New York for LGBT+ folks in the South Asian diaspora. And time and time again, I would be really mistreated by folks in the community. I would just get dirty looks. People wouldn't really want to talk to me. And I was really young! I remember very vividly meeting people who I used to look up to, like influencers and artists, and find them treating me like pure shit. And I started to realize that vanity is something that's really prevalent in the community. Because when I look at my 18 year old self, I was the biggest I ever was. I had the most acne that I've ever had and I just didn't look great. And I was also going through a lot. That was my senior year of high school and also the year when my family had a lot of financial problems. So I was wearing old clothes.
> People make the assumption that I organize within queer and trans spaces because of the homophobia that I've endured from straight people, but actually it's because of the horrible treatment that I endure and experience from queer folks.
I already felt rejected from my straight Brown community. And then here I was again, feeling isolated, rejected from the people I thought would accept me the most. And as I started to meet more queer people, other folks started to say the same thing, that they don't feel comfortable at community events that are supposed to be for us. So I think that's when I had this revelation and wanted to create a community for people who are kind of misfits. So in 2019, I created the South Asian Queer + Trans Collective, a grassroots collective. It had a rocky start because a lot of people didn’t like the fact that we created it. People would show up to our events and then wait until everyone left and I was alone to harass me. But what made me want to organize is knowing how important radical kindness is and how important friendships are. Because the friendships in my life is what saved me and pushed me into who I am today.
Even with abolition: I think abolition is the future, but I feel like it won’t happen unless we’re kinder and care for each other. For example, maybe one of your neighbors doesn't have Wi-Fi and they can't do their assignments. Will you be willing to give them Wi-Fi? Or would you be willing to take care of your other neighbors or take care of their children?
Senior year of high school was the worst year of my life. But at the same time, I wouldn't change anything about it. Because I wonder: if I was to take all those experiences away, would I be able to see the world the way I do now and would I have this self-love and self-power and self-worth that I do?
I think because I've experienced silence for so long that I talk the most now, because I know what it's like to have my voice taken away. I don't take things for granted anymore because I know what it's like to have things taken from me. Being under constant surveillance, I wasn't really allowed to have friends. So now I realize how important friendships are, how important media could be, consumption of books and film, the freedom of choosing how you dress. Now I don't take anything for granted and I will not let people take my voice away from me ever again.
FABLIHA ANBAR (she/they) is a 21-year-old writer and community organizer. They were the creator and Editor-in-Chief of Sorjo Magazine, an online publication for and by the unconventional, which had over 100,000+ readers around the world. They are the youth coordinator for Arts & Democracy, an organization funded by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, where their main focus is cultivating a safe environment for immigrant youth to creatively express themselves. They are also the founder of the South Asian Queer + Trans Collective. You can explore their work and writing here.
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> Radical kindness and empathy is my vision for the world.
Tw: death threats
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I REMEMBER ONE time, I interviewed this same ex-friend about her identities and the piece was on the front cover of the school newspaper. The day it came out, I started getting death threats. And death threats are something that are very normalized, too, because I received death threats all through high school: they would say, if this is Pakistan, I would have reported you, and you would be hanged. When that newspaper came out, they said, you're so disgusting, you can go to hell. We had a three day weekend, and a friend told me, don’t go to school (on Monday). I was like, why? She said, they're planning to jump you.
she/they
*These are my thoughts as of November 2020. I could feel differently in a couple of months or a year because my understanding of my identities is going to be ever-changing, I will always be learning new things.
I WAS BORN in Minnesota and grew up in a neighborhood with and went to school with predominantly white kids and families. I spent a lot of summers in India, going every year or every other year, up to me being about sixteen, and I lived for a year in Dehradun when I was seven. We did not learn a lot about Indigenous cultures in school. Even though Minnesota has a huge Native community, it was really erased. I think I was in second grade or something, when an Indigenous man came to talk to our class and I had several of my classmates ask me if that was my dad. I think that stuck with me because, clearly no, he wasn't. Everybody knew I was Indian, but I think they didn't understand what that meant.
> In that moment I became aware that my Indian identity was white kids not having an understanding of what Indian meant versus what American Indian meant. It made me realize and grapple with what I, as a person with melanin, am in this country.
My mom's dad was from Punjab and he came to Guyana as a Hindu missionary, which is where he met my grandmother. When they got married, patriarchal power played a huge part in my nana and nani’s marriage and my nana didn’t promote his kids learning about Guyanese culture from my nani. And so my mom and her siblings grew up in a pretty Indian household. They ate Indian food. They really didn't know anything about Guyanese food and culture and stuff like that. And so all of the Indian cultures and customs and specifically Hinduism was passed down to me through my grandfather and my mom.
So in learning about my own Indian caste privilege (passed down through my maternal grandfather), I'm researching the caste murkiness in the rest of my ancestry. I’ve also had to really reckon with my Hinduism. Now, I don't honestly even know if I identify as Hindu anymore because of the extremely oppressive history and extremely oppressive present.
> There's a belief in Indo-Caribbean circles that as a result of indenture being an 'equalizer,' caste no longer exists in the Indo-Caribbean community, which is not true. It just shows up in different ways.
It was only once I was in college, or around that age, that I became more aware that my family members, especially on my dad's side, were not really Indian. My dad's family had started a restaurant in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, and he would go there sometimes, but he never really made a big deal out of it. Also in college I realised I wasn’t able to connect with South Asians who’d directly descended from South Asia: despite visiting India, I wasn’t necessarily immersed in Indian culture or even food. So that’s when I was kind of like, OK, there's something else going on here and I want to know what it is.
AS I HAVE learned more about my Caribbean identity, I feel like it’s important to find ways to connect it with my queerness, because otherwise I feel like I'm erasing a part of myself. I've been trying to situate my queerness in history and what that means, if I were to still be living in Guyana, for instance, or if I had queer ancestors, which I have absolutely no idea if I did, because their stories are probably silenced or erased in some way. So if I deepen one understanding, I have to go and deepen the other so I can keep them on parallel paths.
Within Caribbean spaces, queerness is not really accepted and I think it's been interesting trying to find ways to connect with my Caribbean heritage while also incorporating queerness. And so outside of my family, because I obviously can't change that, I have been deliberate in making sure that the Caribbean people I connect with either understand my identities or also share my identities.
MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER means that I have a direct connection to Punjab and so I don't think I would ever stop identifying as South Asian, but a lot of Indo-Caribbean people have no desire to and do not identify as South Asian at all. It’s interesting because there’s definitely a dynamic of South Asians (mostly Indian) looking down on those with indentured ancestry (if they even know we exist at all - I’ve had to explain the history of indenture to a lot of people and that's not fun).
I've found that South Asians who have been harmed by brahminical supremacy are who I often feel the most kinship with, as they understand what it's like to not be part of the dominant culture. Because US immigration laws directly benefited caste-privileged South Asians (as they often have higher education/financial means) there are a lot of upper-caste, north Indians in the US and as a result the dominant South Asian culture in the US is that of upper-caste, Hindu, north Indian. That power dynamic is something that I still struggle with. I can't not be Indian because of my grandfather, but I think if I didn't have that connection, I wouldn't necessarily consider myself as South Asian as I do.
FORMAL HISTORY IS often written by straight white men, even when it comes to places like the Caribbean, so I’ve really appreciated working with and listening to oral histories. While there are some people who share my identity in those oral histories, they also experience the world differently and that has helped me feel less alone in my Caribbean and queer identities. Knowing that there are people who are my age, who are queer and also Caribbean and also have other marginalized identities, and being able to hear those stories and listen to what their childhoods were like and stuff like has helped me visualize and build a community of identities outside of just me. And I think that has been very validating.
DHARANI PERSAUD (she/they) is a writer, organizer, and archival enthusiast. They have publications in Hobart, Kajal Magazine, 2040 Review, and Brown Girl Magazine, and they’re an archivist and co-creator at Ro(u)ted By Our Stories, an intergenerational oral history archive dedicated to capturing, preserving and sharing the stories of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora’s silenced voices. You can explore their work here.
me and my Nani on her birthday in front of the first black cake I've made
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MY MOM MOVED straight from Guyana to Minnesota when she was five or six with her older sister and my grandparents. My dad went from Guyana to Barbados, lived there for a year, and then his mom and sister and him moved to England. Eventually, once my mom and dad got married, they ended up coming back to Minnesota because I think that was what my mom knew and there was some amount of community here already.
>> If you’d like to contribute your story, or share feedback or thoughts on how my process can be made more inclusive or empathetic, feel free to reach out via email or instagram. <<
IDENTITY IS EVOLVING, shifting, and complex. Each of us has multiple layers to our identity and each of these layers can be a site of oppression or privilege. Traditional storytelling, especially when telling stories of communities and people of color, doesn’t allow for this nuance. It makes assumptions about an audience’s ability to handle complexity, it often peddles trauma, and it highlights patterns when there are none. I don’t believe that identity can be put into a singular box and the approach that I’ve taken is aligned with that. There is no holistic narrative around the South Asian American experience, and so, my approach to storytelling was to simply record lived experiences, even if what I discovered surprised or confused me. The design follows a similar path. Instead of choosing a templatized method of design, a unique visual world has been created for each interviewee.
I’m not the only storyteller here. Each person who agreed to participate in South Asian Memory Work is the storyteller of their own story. While I did do the interviewing, transcribing, and art direction, each story was finalised and approved by the storyteller, so as to ensure that the stories you’re now seeing are as each storyteller intended.
I learned to question my own lens, especially when it comes to my sites of privilege. Being a cis woman, queer, caste-privileged, and Indian, I have questioned whether it’s my place to facilitate certain stories, and moving forward, I want to share the controls with creators who more closely share the identities of the interviewees.
I also learned the importance of recording joy. As storytellers, you’re taught to highlight struggle and strife to evoke emotion. When I say that this project is an act of resisting erasure, it’s not just an act of resisting the erasure of struggle. It’s also resisting the erasure of joy, the erasure of liberation, the erasure of solidarity and love, and the erasure of the fullness of being.
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SOUTH ASIAN is a term that encompasses people who largely come from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Kashmir, Tibet, the Maldives, Fiji, the Caribbean, and beyond. It’s a term that encompasses people of diverse caste, class, gender, sexual, religious, and ethnic identities.
But the way the term is used in mainstream American society – by both non-South Asian and South Asian folk – often simplifies this rich diversity of identities and histories, and presents the South Asian American community as a monolith, where the term becomes synonymous with Indian and Hindu. This act of erasure also promotes casteism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, classism, colorism, anti-Blackness, and ableism in our communities.
The intent of South Asian Memory Work is to explore the expansiveness and complexity of South Asian identity by centering the memories and lived experiences of South Asian Americans whose histories and intersecting identities have been erased, and continues to be erased in a mainstream context. By recounting and recording these lived experiences, we can start to visualise a collective future. It should be noted that not everyone who comes from the regions mentioned above identifies as South Asian. The project strongly believes that this term should be never be imposed, and that we should always defer to how people choose to self-identify.
South Asian Memory Work fully recognises that it does not – and cannot – capture every nuance of South Asian American identity, but it hopes to be a start for how we can approach these conversations: where we empower people to self-identity, where we acknowledge and ponder the ways in which our positions of privilege influence our lives and other people’s, and where we hold space for people’s lived experiences, realities, and memories.
This is an ongoing project.
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statement of intent / kaMani sutra / bishakh som / zubi ahmed / bree simran darby / keya acharya / samia zaidi / danushi fernando / lissa deonarain / aakriti khanal / esha pillay / nida allam / anjali of diaspoura / tenying yangsel / ameera khan / gowri k / gayatri sethi / dharani persaud / fabliha anbar / shiraz fazli / ather zia /editor's note
a digital storybook on intersecting identities, erasure, and joy
THIS STORYBOOK IS BEST EXPERIENCED ON A DESKTOP OR OTHER LARGE SCREEN.
THIS STORYBOOK IS BEST EXPERIENCED ON A DESKTOP OR OTHER LARGE SCREEN.
THIS STORYBOOK IS BEST EXPERIENCED ON A DESKTOP OR OTHER LARGE SCREEN.
THIS STORYBOOK IS BEST EXPERIENCED ON A DESKTOP OR OTHER LARGE SCREEN.
THIS STORYBOOK IS BEST EXPERIENCED ON A DESKTOP OR OTHER LARGE SCREEN.
I THINK ABOUT where I belong in the world a lot. I was born and raised in New York. My parents are Afghan and they're immigrants and the way that I've grown up has been just so Afghan in a lot of ways, but being in New York, the way I’ve grown up has been so New York as well. I think of myself as more of a New Yorker than an American.
Editor's Note: This interview
was recorded in Feb 2021, and the flashing ghosts featured above are adopted from Shiraz's body of work
she/her
But as I've looked back over the years, I think they've had a lot of trauma from having to leave Afghanistan and having to live in this totally new country as adults. My dad moved from Kabul to Moscow when he was 18 to go to school, back when it was more peaceful in the country. And then once the fighting between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan started, he had to leave right after graduating and just find a way to any country. And his last choice was the US. But that was, in the end, the only country that accepted him. Once he was here, my dad says that his sister sent him photos of my mom as a potential wife. He was choosing between a couple of people and he had a dream…a vision…of my mom saying, come to Afghanistan. And so he went! In 1992, I think. That was when the Taliban were in power. And so he had this whole crazy journey there with her. And that’s the first time she even left the city, let alone the country.
> Growing up, I absorbed so much from my parents in terms of religion and culture without thinking about it, which I guess is what every kid does.
Also the types of worries that they now have, it just shows me what exactly they've experienced in their past. For example, I have two sisters and my parents are constantly drilling it into our heads…that we can’t leave the family, we can't have fights with each other that will then break the family apart. And I think that’s because separating from their own families is a big thing for them. They both have not really had any contact with their own families because they live in either Afghanistan or some other places in Europe.
Click for an audio recording of the section above, in Shiraz's voice
> I think he was trying to protect me from discrimination and bigotry and stuff like that, but all it did was confuse me even more.
I DEFINITELY HAVE FAITH in a higher being or God. I mean, I still call myself a Muslim, and I think about religion and God a lot. I think it's really influenced by how my dad believes in God. He's always talking about how God is the most forgiving. He has this very kind of perception of God. I don’t think all religious people paint God in that way, and even some other family members have a more harsh perception. I was agnostic throughout high school, but I feel like once I was away from my family during college, I started to really appreciate being brought up with some sort of faith and spirituality. I feel like being around people who aren't Muslim kind of made me feel more Muslim in a way.
I THINK IN TERMS of being an immigrant child and stuff like that, I really do believe in this idea of generational trauma and inheriting that from your family and really having to work through it yourself. And I feel like for me, a lot of it comes out in my artwork because a lot of it also deals with this crisis of identity and trying to figure out where you belong in American society or culture. I also feel like when I read about traditional kinds of Western American therapy or even talk to therapists, it's really hard to make them understand the cultural elements of my life or find resources that specifically address these elements.
I feel like they've drilled that story into me so many times that it's just always had this impact on the way that I think about my place in the US and what I'm doing here. It feels like there's a lot of pressure to do really well now that I'm here, and also having to be grateful for it. So it gets really complicated when I criticize the US, because that's actually something that they're really touchy about. I try not to bring it up too much around them (heavy emphasis on the "try") because they're so grateful to even be here.
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Click for an audio recording of the section above, in Shiraz's voice
SHIRAZ FAZLI (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist born and based in Brooklyn, New York. In drawings, paintings, and videos, she visualizes the ghosts of the past and the undefined location of those who wander. In doing so, she finds inspiration in the constantly changing landscape of time. Her menacing figures entangle with each other as they overlap, collide, and multiply over abstract spaces, demonstrating humanity’s inherent interconnectivity through the chaos. You can explore her work here.
> But in reality, they just know what they've seen on TV and maybe what their family is telling them. So that just isn't a big enough information pool.
I JUST WANT to educate so many people about Afghanistan and its people and the culture and the art. I just want to show Afghans and non-Afghans alike how this is a place that deserves to be kind of invested in and deserves to have some hope and isn't constantly this disputed territory. I want people to find the beauty in Afghanistan and also educate people just about the power of art itself. I think there are a lot of Afghans in the diaspora who seem sort of self-colonized almost. It feels like they've taken in so much from Western and American media and what they're saying about Afghanistan and how Americans portray it. And so they don't really engage critically with it because they think, oh, I'm Afghan, I know what's going on.
Click for an audio recording of the section above, in Shiraz's voice
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I think as a super young kid, my Afghanness was just a given. I always think of childhood as the purest time. I just remember…the carpets that we have and the music my mom would make us dance to, and the traditional Afghan clothes that we have at home, all of that made me feel so special as a kid. I remember we would have some family friends who are Afghan and just being around them, I felt really secure. It wasn’t until middle school that I started to feel like, I am Afghan and these people are not Afghan. I think that's when I was trying to reject my Afghan identity rather than embrace it. Around then, I remember trying so hard to be like these other white people. Still, I never hid the fact that I’m Afghan, other than one time because my dad was telling me to tell people I was from Russia.
THINGS CHANGED IN HIGH SCHOOL and I started trying to be this subversive punk teenager, who could always back it up with my Afghanness and being anti-military and stuff like that. Since then, I don’t feel like my relationship with it has been completely consistent. There are definitely times when I’m trying to learn as much as I can, and make my Farsi better, and just engage with it consciously. And then there are other times where I feel like I need a break from thinking about Afghanistan for a while, even if I can never truly forget about it. And I guess that's that is kind of a privilege as well, to be honest. I think it was after I moved back home after college, after those four years, I felt the emptiness and lack of an Afghan community. So even if the community was literally just my other family members, I really embraced it, and said, yes, I need to get better knowing the language and what’s going on in Afghanistan. I also started to meet other Afghans. My family had kind of painted this picture of Afghans in the US being super conservative. But eventually through Instagram, I started to find all these other Afghans who are just badass, anti-colonialist types of people, and it just feels so good to talk with them.
> I am an Afghan person, and I feel like anything I make is just Afghan art.
I just remember reading about it and learning more about it and feeling, I thought we are over this kind of weird ‘white person with their POC friend’ storyline. I was like, OK, there needs to be something different. And so I decided to collect stories of Afghans, and make art that's kind of inspired by their stories. Not showing exactly what they're describing, but just kind of interpreting the feelings and ideas of it, because I do like abstraction and the freedom that comes with it. And this project is first and foremost for the eyes and hearts of other Afghans rather than the Western white gaze.
I used to be so into trying to find galleries or shows I could show at, but it just really is not that fulfilling to me, to be honest. Instead, I like putting art on clothes, so people can really engage with it or I like working with the community. I think community is just such a big part of life of my artwork, like the Afghan Story Project for instance. I thought of it after I read about this atrocious show: United States of Al. [For context, it’s this show about an Afghan interpreter who comes to the US. There’s a American military veteran that's his best friend and they…I don't know… have fun together I guess.]
Even if it's just a painting of the landscape in New York or something, it would still be art by an Afghan person. I view art as something that really does have your identity embedded within it, you just can't separate your identity from what you're making. I don't think that means you should only relegate myself or other Afghan artists to galleries specific to let's say like South Asian artists. And that's kind of all the representation we get. I don't like that either. But I think that within the past few years, I’m making my art about my identity and acknowledging the ways in which my experiences have impacted the way that I make art.
I GREW UP in the foothills of a mountain in Kashmir. This mountain has two names. One name is Shankaracharya and the other one is Takht-i-Sulaiman, meaning the throne of Solomon. I was a kid, so I wasn't really paying attention that it was referred to by two names, or that these were two different names coming from two different religious streams and histories. I lived with my maternal grandfather and he was the one who raised me. Growing up, I kind of knew personally who I was and what my family wanted me to do.
Another memory that shaped my political subjectivity, maybe even before Bhat’s hanging, is the passing of Sheikh Abdullah. As a young kid I was taken to see the funeral by my family. I recall watching the funeral procession from a tall building. Looking at the corpse, I recall thinking his face was yellow. I do not know if this memory is correct since Muslims usually cover the face of a corpse. There were thousands of people in the procession. I remember feeling a lot of tension, not only because people were crying. Abdullah was very well-loved by a section of people but many in the crowd I was in were calling him gaddar or a traitor. I recall this word stuck in my mind, not knowing what it meant. For a long time I thought the people were saying “gadda” meaning donkey. The “gaddar” word was used in reference to his capitulation to India.
ANOTHER MEMORY IN the early 90s was when I was waiting for a friend of mine, who had promised that we would meet in Lal Chowk, which is the center of Srinagar. She was a Kashmiri Pandit and I'm a Kashmiri Muslim. Until that point in time, I didn't really think about the difference of religion as pivotal or being a barrier. Our meeting would be the first time we would hang out outside school and without being chaperoned. I got there at 11 am and waited until 2 pm…she didn’t come. So then when I went home, I tried to call her, but I learned nothing. After some searching, I came to know she had migrated. Majority of Kashmiri Pandits in the early 90s migrated from Kashmir. Most were scared of the militancy. Majority of the Pandits sided with India, and a Kashmiri resistance which was dual centered around Independence and accession to Pakistan was not aligned to their political vision with a Hindu India.
Barring some exceptions, most Pandits have always supported Indian rule. In an atmosphere of distrust and fear, there were selective killings of prominent Kashmiri personalities who supported India; this was from both the Muslim and Pandit community. Scholars note that the selective killings by the militants were based on politics and not religion, but many Pandits accused the resistance or the Tehreek for being communal. Muslims blame the political violence and the perception of fear, which was amplified by the government that facilitated the migration. Despite call for the same, the government of India thus far has not initiated any inquiry into the killings despite clamor from both the Pandit as well as the Muslim community.
I was very young to make sense of politics, but one of my earliest memories that shaped my political subjectivity is the hanging of Maqbool Bhat in the early eighties. Bhat is considered to be the father of the Kashmiri independence movement, and he was hanged by the Indian government. His name stuck in my mind. I would ask questions about him and I would get different answers. He had been punished in Pakistan. He was a fierce Kashmiri nationalist. After being jailed in India he was hanged. His body is interred in Tihar jail. In that sense even his dead body is jailed. Growing up there wasn't a lot of literature on him.
ANOTHER SAD INCIDENT was when a batchmate in high school was killed. He was walking just a few paces behind me. While I crossed the road, he probably was lagging behind and got caught in a crossfire. His killing changed something fundamental for me, as did the overall political crisis and extreme human rights violations that Indian military occupation wrecked on Kashmiris. All these incidents and events, the rise of armed resistance, grave human rights abuses by the Indian military and other forces shaped my political subjectivity. I thought, why is this happening? And there was no coherent explanation. I asked an uncle of mine, why is this happening? And he said, these are the questions that you have to find answers for yourself.
He said:
They
have
put
padlocks
on
our lips.
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The immense violation of people’s rights in response to their demands made me think about the kind of political system we were living in. I had studied about democracy in school but what I saw around me made me start thinking, if they call it a democracy, how can people be disappeared like that? How can we have so much militarization? When Kashmiris speak about there being “peace” before 1989, or the ideals of democracy being in place, that really needs to be unpacked, because this nostalgia is sometimes misrepresented in Indian narratives.
When Kashmiris say there was peace before 1989, they are not saying that there was an absence of Indian military aggression before 1989. Or that Kashmiris were not asking for our political rights. We have been coerced every decade. In every decade, our movement was criminalized further. There has never been peace in Kashmir. Before 1989, there was an absence of brazen and direct militarization, but the militarization had started in 1947 itself. In fact, I remember being in school when these things started unfolding. I would count the number of bullets I heard and keep a log of it. I don't know what that meant to my teenage brain. I guess it kind of told me the intensity of the fight that was going on.
As a political anthropologist, enforced disappearances allowed understanding and explaining the Kashmir dispute specifically through Kashmiri women’s eyes. It gave me a chance to look at Kashmir’s history, talk about weaponization of democracy and also bring Kashmiri women into the limelight. Not that we are glorifying their desperation and glorifying the human rights violations that are pushing them to join mainstream life. We’re talking about how Kashmiri women have always shown their agency. Women have always worked side by side with men. And also, Kashmiri society is just as unique as any other society, it’s as patriarchal as any other society. It's not uniquely patriarchal as India has been portraying it to be.
I MOVED TO London as a journalist for BBC in 2001, but realized that as a journalist I was not able to read and write freely. I went back to Kashmir. I had qualified for Kashmir Administrative Service (KAS) and was posted as a Community Development Officer. I felt it was a perfect amalgam, I could serve marginalized communities, and pursue writing as well. But bureaucracy in Kashmir is a doubly convoluted beast. Towards the end of my KAS run, I self-diagnosed myself with the Kashmiri bureaucratic schizophrenia. This ailment begins when you are doing what you think is just a job that includes routine challenges of civil services, but you steadily become aware of how strategic your role is in strengthening the Indian apparatus. At this juncture, your positionality becomes awash in moral greys, which, depending on your life options, fuel either your flight or petrification.
I found myself having to pay obeisance to higher up bureaucrats and the local ministers. And the ministers are so beholden to India. I also felt that as a Kashmiri, I had already been feeling subjugation actively and brazenly since 1989. I just could not do it. So I decided I would leave for higher studies. But you really can't study Kashmir in Kashmir. Because you can’t really speak the way you want to speak for Kashmir, in Kashmir. You have to leave. I would never have wanted to leave like the way I did, but I had to put this distance. If I could have, I would have been doing Kashmir work in Kashmir and I would have been with my family. But I had to leave.
> I would never have wished this exilic condition, as Agha Shahid calls it, on anyone.
And what complicates this further is that after 18+ years of studying and being focused on Kashmir, I’ve come to realize that I'm in someone else's nightmare. How is it possible that I can come to America, trying to study Kashmir, write about Kashmir, and then be part of the settler colonialism perpetuated on the First Nations here? The US is a settler colonial state which the patina of “democracy” had hidden, and in the recent years, this irony of my positionality is sinking in. Our fight as Kashmiris is against India, and it is also against the structure of imperialism and neocolonialism activated by the weaponization of neoliberal democracy.
EARLY IN MY TIME in the US, I was trying to find a voice for myself because all I had seen as a Kashmiri was Indian authors, Indian writers, Indian researchers – even as they visited Kashmir as friends – me and my counterparts felt like we were under scrutiny. They would take my narrative, take it elsewhere, and make it their narrative. They would add stuff to it. When I’d talk to Indian feminists and then read the chapters that they would write after talking to me, they would demonize Kashmiri men and make Kashmiri women seem more desperate than let’s say Indian women. I would always say, where is the Kashmiri woman they witnessed? There's so much about Kashmiri women in the Indian narrative, but the Kashmiri woman who really thinks for herself, is agentive or has come a long way, she's mostly invisibilized. Kashmiri patrirachal structure is shown as uniquely violent and oppressive.
And now it's also getting more complicated because of the Hindu supremacist agenda, and Islamophobia is huge as well. India sees the work of Kashmiris like me as “intellectual terrorism.” In the last 74 years, the Indian hegemony on discourse on Kashmir – which has begun to wane, thank God – , obfuscated Kashmiri political demands to the point of criminalization and created ways to erase international attention and solidarity for Kashmir. Scholars have challenged India’s arguments, especially those that obfuscate Kashmir’s historical demand for a democratic sovereignty; that present Kashmir issue as Pakistan’s proxy war; or reduce it to the erroneous stereotype of “Islamic terrorism” and relegate it to a domestic law and order situation. India continues to spin Kashmiri resistance as “terrorism” and the onslaught on my work or that of my counterparts becomes a low hanging fruit.
Click for an audio recording of the section above, in Ather's voice
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> On 5th August 2019 the Indian-occupied Kashmir burst anew into the international conscience when India militarily and against its own constitution removed the region's quasi-autonomous status.
I ALWAYS HAD this journalist side, but I’ve also always had a linkage with creative writing, literature and arts. It was my main love. In fact, I actually wanted to do my masters in fine arts, but I ended up in journalism because there was no writing program in Kashmir. And that has happened to a lot of Kashmiri students. I don't know if even now, the Kashmir University has a creative writing department. I founded the e-zine Kashmir Lit in 2008. I wanted it to be a platform for Kashmiris to write and be published. And these would be young Kashmiris who are not being heard and who don't have many avenues. It could be poetry. It could be fiction. I wanted to do something on an international level. Kashmir Lit also invites people from across the LoC to contribute. For the last 70 years, Kashmiris across the divide haven't really been on one platform together. And I'm not saying Kashmir Lit is unique in that. But that's been my focus, to bring voices from across the LoC, for them to write and create resonance with the political agony suffered by the other side. Recently, Kashmir Lit started a new series called Mulakaat Ganimat (meaning, meeting is a boon). This program aims to produce conversations with people who are serving the society through arts and politics.
WHEN I DIE, I want them to say that she spoke for Kashmir in the way Kashmiris want to be spoken of. With grace, honor and respect for their identity, resistance, and politics, with whatever tools she had: be it day-to-day living, academia, poetry, and small conversations with someone. The legacies people will leave are so small in front of the sufferings of the people. But we need to persist in not allowing hegemonic occupiers to erase us.
ATHER ZIA, PhD (she/her) is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, and Advocate of the Year Award 2021. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection “The Frame” (1999) and another collection is forthcoming. In 2013 Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region.
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Afterhours, I would find some kindred colleagues equally stuck in the schizophrenic funk as they took turns justifying their position in the services. Some said it was just a job to meet family obligations; others asserted that if it were not for them, people would lack essential services. A few irrepressible ones thought they would change the system from within. Some loved the status the office brought with it. Others felt their presence was crucial to protect Kashmir's regional interests. A few bragged they were becoming privy to classified information which helped them understand the Indian machinations better; to what end, it baffles me till today. Also while most wanted laurels matching their competence, initially at least, their default mode was resistance to the Indian ministrations as much as any other non-civil servant Kashmiri.
So as far as Pakistani solidarity in diaspora is concerned, as of today I think Kashmiris are now more confident in how to voice and seek their rights. In the last one decade and more so since 2019, Pakistanis in diaspora are giving Kashmiris the kind of solidarity Kashmiris need: which is, throwing their weight behind Kashmiris' right to choose their own political destiny.
WHEN I FIRST CAME to the US, there were a lot of Kashmiris already here, working for the Kashmir cause. They are senior people and they have faced different a geopolitical situation, which of course has changed and has not as well. In the early 2000's, the diaspora was sort of in flux because the Kashmiri resistance had entered a new phase. The militancy had ebbed, a second intifada which consisted of more grassroots resistance had set in, there was an urgency, and the road map was still evolving. On 5th August 2019, the Indian occupied Kashmir burst anew into the international conscience when India militarily and against its own constitution removed the region’s quasi-autonomous status.
In the early 2000’s, what was happening in Kashmir was this new policy called Healing Touch. A new party aided and abetted by the Indian government had formed and was said to be giving a “healing touch” to people. And by that, they meant that they were propagating a kind of soft autonomy, where movement across the Line of Control (LoC) would be made easier and the local government would take charge of its resources.
As Kashmiris in the region were silenced, the diaspora and their allies were activated to garner support for the people long brutalized and pushed into the corner by Indian policies. August 2019 became another milestone when the issue of Kashmir resurged and re-internationalized. Countless voices, both Kashmiris and from their allies, across Europe, across the US, were able to come together, despite differences and seize the moment. And I think it also affected Kashmiris of all shades, class and inclinations. The carpet was pulled from under everyone’s feet. I must add that the autonomy under Article 370 was a symbol of Kashmir’s historical sovereignty and it served to underwrite the demand of self-determination by the Kashmiri people. Kashmiris were for the autonomy more to protect their territorial sovereignty and keep Indian settlers at bay, rather than any kind of loyalty to India.
Before 1947, Kashmiris lived under a monarch who was a Hindu. He was a tyrant and Kashmiris lived mostly in indentured slavery. The Dogra dynasty had paid money to the British in 1846 for Kashmir, so for the next hundred years, they were trying to recoup the investment. So as a result, the majority of the Kashmiri Muslims lived a hand-to-mouth existence. There were lots of droughts. There were plagues. And our sense of identity was embattled. Both during the Sikh rule and the Dogra rule, the majority of masjids were made in the stables, and Kashmiri Muslims were not allowed to pray.
In the early 20th century, Kashmiris begun getting education, especially at Aligarh Muslim University and also going to Lahore and Karachi. We started having access to newspapers. So Muslims in Kashmir were getting aware of the fact that they were being treated really badly, not just politically, but their religious freedom was also compromised. That’s when young leaders like Sheikh Abdullah came up, who led the fight against the Dogras. His party later on drafted the Naya Kashmir manifesto that was fashioned on the Communist Manifesto. Even though a Kashmiri nationalist, he essentially ended as a client politician and put his weight behind a coerced “integration” policy with India.
WITH REGARDS TO my Muslim identity, I didn't realize how lucky we were to be growing up in a place where at least something related to our identity had been resolved, and that was the acceptance of who Kashmiris were as Muslims. I might just be speaking for my own family. In Muslim households, there’s this joke: If you have a prayer mat and you keep it open, people say, oh, you kept the prayer mat open, now Satan is going to come and pray. Which is just a way of saying, roll up your mat. But it would bother my grandfather that people would say this, and he would respond:
Do you know there was a time not too long ago, when it was not so easy to unroll the prayer mat? So why do you keep asking me to roll it?
she/her
So now, how do Indians offer solidarity? That's very tricky. There are many academics and friends who I love, who are with you when you talk about human rights violations in Kashmir, but the moment you speak about the political dispute, they tune out because then they feel that their nation state is attacked. And if I was to be in solidarity with those people who are saying, only stop human rights violations, my own political loyalties will get diluted. Because I don't only want to stop human rights violations, I want the political dispute to end because human rights violations are occuring precisely because our political rights are annilated. It's not as if India just decides to kill Kashmiris. India is killing Kashmiris because they're seeking Azadi which is not palatable to India. So even when you get solidarity, it's a conditional solidarity, it's a selective solidarity, which means it's a shallow solidarity, which means there's no solidarity at all.
AS FAR AS PAKISTAN is concerned, Kashmiris of all inclinations share an affective relation with Pakistan. That is non-negotiable. As for political goals, while the majority of Kashmiri Muslims seek independence, a strong section wants to accede to Pakistan. Most Kashmiri Muslims continue to share a deeply affective relation with Pakistan based on religious, spiritual, cultural and trade ties that predate the formation of what is now Pakistan and India. The breadth of this relationship is reflected in arguments the last Dogra king made when the Indian leaders were influencing him to join their union in 1947. He argued that Kashmir was fully dependent on the region that became Pakistan and was geographically contiguous as well. Kashmiris across the LoC continue to bear the brunt of brutal division of their homeland that separates families and valuable resources.
Editor's Note:
This interview was recorded in July 2021, and co-edited with Ather in September 2021.
Ather is a political anthropologist, so she has grounded her story in socio-political context. As you read, hover over the blue underlined text to access the reference.
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> But politically, I was not much aware, especially in the early years, because of the obfuscation and invisibilization of the people's history in Kashmir.
ONE OF THE MOST vivid memories I have is that of a mother who would sit on the porch of her house, asking passersby if they have seen her son or if he is coming. I slowly realized that it was not just a routine query but that her son had been forcibly disappeared in custody by the Indian army. The mother had lost her mental balance. Later I began to witness Parveena Ahanger, the mother who co-founded the human rights group known as the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (or the APDP).
