stumbled upon this interesting video post at fader tv with the accompanying text by matthew schnipper:
“Swede Victoria Bergsman aka Taken By Trees (who you may best know for being the female counterpart to Peter Bjorn and John on “Young Folks”), went to Pakistan to record her upcoming album, East of Eden. She had an occasionally difficult, if not enlightening, experience (as her fixer’s Facebook rant details), but ultimately came out with a lush album (and a cover of Animal Collective’s “My Girls”). Nat Geo spoke to her in a very nice field and cut that with some footage shot recording and elsewhere in Pakistan to compile a short documentary about the album from genesis to completion.”
my comment:
this is really interesting and i applaud bergmans sense of adventure and cosmopolitanism… to go out to a place in the world that is foreign to her to seek inspiration and do something new with her sound. i felt she was very senstive to the cultural differences by her spoken narrative, but at the same time i think she could have clarified further that it was not so much that she had to have her expectations be “lower” (as she said) but just be different. obviously a pakistani musical aesthetic, espcially in the genres of ghazal and qawwalis which she seemed to be drawing from, approach music making differently than the west. but that should be taken up as equal to and not “lower than” a western approach. also, i wonder if she sourced any of the pakistani artists she worked with?
thoughts?
i am currently finishing up a thesis which ties together vedic ontology, cosmopolitanism and human rights. sounds unrelated? well… they are rather disparate topics i’ll admit, but in examing each philosophy at a deep hermeneutical level i have concluded that they may, at some level, be saying the same thing: we are one, this is justified by nothing (but nothing is really ever justified), and what is the point of violence given this schema?
obviously i fill out this argument extensively in the actual thesis, but this is basically what it boils down to for me. as much as i am invested in certain critical race discourses, the entire disipline is honed in a soil of difference. i am pretty much unable to reconcile this my cosmopolitan identity and yearning to be one with the world and all. so i leave it as a contradicition and remind myself that life is not a neat or coherent narrative.
i realized if i wanted to claim both the uniqueness of the brown womanhood and the cosmopolitan ethos of one world humanity (without that being a suffocating one world blanket mono culture model) i would need to approach this thesis creatively. hence i turned to vedic scripts which are thousands of years old and which are both intimatley indian in thier origins and universally applicable in their themes of questions about reality and our place in reality. the result has been interesting so far… i am attempting to suggest modern cosmopolitan discourse look to vedic ontology to underpin its own weakly defined ontology. this vedic-cosmopolitan discourse then supplies a rather powerful argument to the construction of identity as understood in contemporary human rights discourse… how do we understand the human in human rights anyway? i try to unpack this construction by contrasting it with vedic-cosmopolitan understandings of human identity to through it into sharp relief.
the thesis is yet unfinished so i have yet to see if this project will come together… will be happy to get the project done in case. one month countdown… dun dun dun.
I love MIA and her music, and I love what she is trying to do. She is inserting her person and her craft into a space between the mainstream narrative of pop culture and the accepted norms of what south asian, womyn of color are “supposed” to prescribe to. However, because of the fact this is new territory she is embarking on, it is quite crucially imporant that she locate her politics and identify how she is informed- explicitly.
This is not to suggest that she hasnt tried, but i fear the way media translate her message to the masses…. a lot stands to get lost in translation. Media are created and informed by the dominant narrative- white, liberal, capitalist, patriachal ways of knowing. MIA does not fit into the mainstream narrative nor, indeed, does she fit with the accepted narrative of what constitutes the other. So what is happening instead is the following: the media are building this third way narrative about her using the language and tools of the other two storylines. The result: she is characterized as a mytical day-glo visionary underpinned by dangerous terrorist philosophies. The details of MIA as a brown female revolutionary speaking on behalf of an oppressed population on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean bores the socks off of the american apparel generation who understand skin color as trendy and war protest as a “cool” first and political second.
“Oh she’s a terrorist” or “oh her clothes are weird” are not unrelated characterizations which can be charted as better or worse on a hierachal scale. they are equally dangerous positions not just for her, but for all those who are othered, who falls through the cracks of nomative narrative. As a brown woman, for her blaze/claim a space to be who she wants to be, neither a pop tart, nor a bollywood princess, is a very difficult task indeed. she can nonetheless very easily be translated as the hysterical, weird, bizarre, perhaps even exotic but ultimately backward and uncivilized creature that the orientalist narrative dictates for brown, black, yellow, red, people.
Bollywood has arrived in hollywood… except that it hasnt. the critical and commercial success of slumdog millionaire in the west is sparking off all sorts of india fetishist trends in n america and it reduces an entire film industry to an orientalized bauble of its vibrant self. this is bollywood on hollywood’s terms, not bwood speaking for itself.
Amitah Bachan, the biggest baddest actor in bollywood, commented that gora log don’t care about India until we show them our poverty in reference to the content of the movie. In examining the film and film alone I couldn’t disagree with him more- the movie is about so much more than just poverty. Its about hope, humanity in the slums, about people and their lives that the everyday richer Indian ignores. How many films has bollywood made about the slums? But embedding that comment into larger social/politlcal/economic contexts of hollywood’s interest in bollywood, in being complicit in the greater project of constructing Indians (and all other members of the “third world”) in certain stereotypes so it can know itself as relationally higher at the top of socially constructed hierarchy, I can make sense of that comment.
Its much easier to see India as full of slums then a rising economic superpower that threatens America. Its much easier to see Indian men as violent and backward then educated and rich (not that I’m trying to create binaries with these examples). the way the movie has been taken up here and showered with awards has much more to do with the politics of creating firmer ties with India than fostering brotherhood and sisterhood across artistic communities. It is very jarbeled how the west is understanding India, I can see it and feel it. I know how differently India sees itself, and I think to an extent bollywood thinks it’s being understood in the west a certain way when it really isn’t. there is no empowerment in being the underdog because you are still the UNDER DOG which means there is a bigger dog somewhere bestowing that “honor” on you, constructing you as lesser then, and making space/allowance for you. But the power is still in their hands as they construct you.
I was sickened by the way the Indian cast was handled on the red carpet (ohh you’re wearing burberry? wow… really? Don’t you uh, love H&m?), how the little kids and larger bollywood cast members were basically ignored, and the shining jewel of the film (colonial reference intended), frieda pinto, is being constructed as this exotic other. What tired stereotypes. Suddenly no one is making fun of her south asian accent, its being constructed as a lilting british drawl, and shes a pretty young thing that can just be plugged into the hollywood economy that sells more pretty young things.
I also have very mixed feelings about how this film is directed by a white man. I don’t think we could have asked for a more sensitive pair of eyes to film this movie, it is apparent that danny boyle really cares for his subject and subjects in this film. This rant is not about him or his intentions. But it is about his position and place. He is a white man from the uk. These awards went to him. His place can’t be ignored, this is more than just a coincidence… that a movie about India made by a white man is much more palatable to the west than if this was a movie made by an Indian. the awards that went to a r rahman are as much a part of the ploy of getting a piece of the bollywood pie. rahman has made far better music for countless bollywood scores (rangeela, mangal pandey, dil se to name a few favs). But hollywood or the west never noticed until it was presented to them via the movie of a white man.
while it is true that bollywood does not concentrate its energies on such subject matter, there ARE indian films on such critical social topics- but apprently in an indian voice it simply does not resonate. regardless, everytime a bollywood film has western recognition at an award show, everytime the west throws it a bone, the indian film industry acts as though they have finally been valorized…. mental colonialism goes deep
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gender relations in the 21st century, at a fundamental level, have hardly evolved past cavemen beating a woman over the head with a club and dragging her home by her hair. its the same old shit repackaged in new ways: woman, put on some really high heels so you can teeter precariously on the brink between accepted norms of femine sexaulity and blind ignorance to the state of your entraped position.
i was at work minding my own business last night and my older male boss has the audacity to come up to me and make really inappropriate comments about my body and clothes. he treats the women that work under “rule” like ornaments, pretty little things that he string up for decoration and attract customers with, and apparently entertain himself with. he continues to look at women through the most uninformed, patrichal lens imaginable: we are only know as woMEN, in relation to men: much like a colored person is known only in comparison to point neutral: apprently white. so at work i am less then just a lowly worker, i am a female worker, which means that, statistically speaking i make less than a man, and that rather than being known for my own work and own way of thinking i am in constant comparison to a male standard that does not fit my way of knowing, not to mention the fact that i reduced to a body as a be all and end all means of understanding me– at least by this boss. this is not about man hate or white hate- this space take over does not have room to waste for hate- this is about reclaimation and moving the movement.
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the truth about your experience if you’re a female and if you’re brown is that in the west that’s read in a very particular way: you’re othered and dominated on two fronts, a gendered one and a racialized one. the fucked up thing about the way politics or law is structured to read you is that you’re either a female or a brown. the importance of your intersectionality, as living life and having an experience not as one or another but as BOTH is not accounted for properly. how could it? seeing as all these institutions are made in the image of a monied, white, male. why would the status quo really bother changing what works for them? if it subsumes their own in its wake, the few who are rich and powerful dont feel the pinch.
how can i claim my identity to just one box? its impossible in the same way its impossible for me to ever be color blind living in a society where, hell living in a world where, relative privilege is given to white. i am always going to be aware that i am brown or othered because that defines my everyday life- i can’t just conveniently ignore it and breathe in the air around me for free because it COST something, it cost the blood, sweat and tears of people in the third world- the world where i am come from. to be white is to be the ultimate invisible ethnicity because it blends into this air, into the background because it has made itself the standard against which the colored world is compared against. just to reference everyone else as non-white shows this- we are non white because we are not white- as if that’s the natural starting point. why do we not refer to white people as people of non-colour?
i titled this entry intersecion(ation)ality because my nationality isn’t as simple as tied to the state where my passport happens to be from; my lived experience is much more complex then that, not thin enough to be collapsed behind one flag or one national anthem. my nationality is one of an intersection of male/female, white/brown, rich/poor, gay/straight: is it so hard to imagine one could be all at once and therefore none: hence ultimately just human? this is not a rallying cry for some simplified one-world vision of cosmopolitanism, melting borders and all that. rather it goes beyond, the process of arriving at the state human needs to be seriously clarified lest we collapse back into a power imbalance only at a supra-state level.
every summer during my undergrad years i was lucky enough to be able to travel and disconnect from north america and reconnect with the entire world “out there”. last summer i spent my time criss crossing ghana in west africa and then teaching english in a village in the north of the country called kandiga.
it was the single hardest confrontation i’ve had with the “third world” in all my travels, and i did feel pretty confident going into that trip about being able to live in places that dont have all the resources the west takes for granted. what i found however, was that it wasn’t a lack of those material luxuries that made the trip hard, but rather it was the very difficult time i was having connecting to the people around me. i was immediately distanced when the title “abroni” was unceremoniously slapped on me pretty much the second i stepped of the plane. abroni means white person. i went to ghana lost in expectations of an inbuilt comradeship- i am brown, these are my brothers and sisters who were also oppressed by british colonialism, we can have good dialouge. but i was boxed into the very same category of rich foreigner as they would determine a white british citizen to be. i was crushed and confused, in the village no one had even heard of india.
i quickly caught on though that what informed this title was not as simple as me having white skin or not, but rather it was for the first time i was exposed to a thought construct that literally used black as its own comparative standard: that is to say, if one was not black, they were something else: white. and white did not just mean skin colour, it meant different, it usually meant rich and unfortunately a lot of people did associate it with power and reverence. so while linguistic privilege was afforded to blackness, empowerment did not run through and through with its definition.
i will share a journal entry i wrote at the time that i was there inspired by these thoughts that i think explains my headspace at the time:
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i was sitting at a subway stop waiting for the train when i spotted this promo ad for this tv series on globaltv ontario called “the guard” and my jaw dropped (my mental jaw that is always engaged in critical thought processes anyway). i couldn’t help but be shocked (in a numb sort of way because really this kind of stuff is to be expected) at the blatant forms of racism, sexism and conservative politics at play in this ad, and yet i knew that the people sitting down at the other end of the bench from me probably took one glance at the poster and moved on with their day. i meanwhile, was stuck in a moment of horror and disgust and analysis of its supposedly unoffensive content.
this is what the poster was (i couldn’t find an image of it online to post): there was a bluish backdrop of non descript space, with a picture of a helicopter in the air above a turbulent sea. in the immediate foreground was an image of a white man, arms crossed, chest puffed out, steady gaze into the camera and his mouth was set in a grim, firm line. the caption read, “we do what we have to.”
this is how i read the poster: this vague undefined space which we have arbitrarily claimed as ours (ie. canada, which was once turtle island, but who’s asking the first nations and Inuit peoples these days anyway?) is now under some sort of undefined threat from people “out there” (from land that is not blue perhaps? perhaps brown or black?) and so we need to use these technologies of war and aggression to protect our borders in the air and in the water. and in the case that any strangers try to enter by land, we have the guard: our shining male hero to save us all from harm. we embody this hero in this white, male body who has physical strength, supposedly has mental prowess, possesses the authority of law which we (men anyway) have bestowed upon him, and ultimately he is going to “guard” us all from what’s out there, by any means necessary- he is going to do what he has to do- it may be dirty work- but at least it will save us all in the end. we trade off human rights as if they were bargaining chips on a poker table for a prize of safety and security which we imagine is airtight and in fact securable in the first place.
when you are not afforded a space you forge one for yourself.
this is a small invasion from the margins. a reclaimation of identity and of voice- a space to say what i want to say in my own voice and not have to translate it into forms that the academy or society at large valorizes and comprehends as “proper”: that to me is knowledge colonialism at its finest: say things in a way that we decide is right and we decide is suitable. screw that. i want to put my thoughts out there in a voice that is my own, unadulterated by popular ways of knowing. i am a womyn, i am brown, i think like this and i do not apologize for it.
life, via a brown gaze, crystalizes in far more complex and multi-dimensional ways then it is popularly delievred. and yes i use the term brown in full power, i am not colored, i am not a “minority”, i am not non white- i am this in its own capacity, and i’m moving in.
