“They tell me you’ve been listening to women’s problems.”

November 25^th marked the International Day against Violence against Women and the interlinked 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign highlights the need for creating awareness on gender-based violence.  More on the Women and Media Collective’s Sri Lankan campaign can be found here: http://srilanka16days.wordpress.com/

Here’s my contribution. Mostly because a few years ago when I was researching labour relations on a tea plantation in Bogawantalawa, the women workers thought I was there to ‘listen to women’s problems’. The incident that ensues remained confined within the pages of an undergraduate dissertation, but 2 years later, I feel like I owe it to She who shall remain unnamed, to make sure that others hear her story and act against violence against women.

The following is a loosely adapted section from an unpublished Social Anthropology dissertation entitled ‘An Alternative View of Plantation Patriarchy: A Study of Labour Relations among Indian-Origin Tamil Workers on a Sri Lankan Tea Plantation’

—

“They tell me you’ve been listening to women’s problems.”

“Are you the one listening to the women’s problems?” She is small, and crooked from the weight of the fraying fertilizer sack full of leaves she has grown accustomed to carrying each day. I am startled, unsure as to how I should respond. I have spent a couple of weeks engaged in Malar’s welfare visits, familiarising myself with the winding paths and sunburnt faces. I have not met her before.

“They tell me you’ve been listening to women’s problems.” She repeats anxiously. I nod. “Don’t write down my name. Don’t tell anyone.”

Now, I am intrigued but am unsure as to what she thinks my role is. “When he drinks he changes. He breaks my head, my arms and legs. When he leaves, he is fine but when he comes back… I have taken on all the responsibilities of the man of the house. My four children work as domestic helpers in Colombo. You must do something to stop the sale of alcohol in the lines.”

I am bewildered. She plucks at the hedge we are standing against, crushing the leaves between her green-stained fingers. A nervous memory that rests only in her hands after the hours spent plucking kolanda (tea leaf).

“Will you tell them about how the women here suffer? Please do not write my name. Women suffer in the field and the house. We do not even have the freedom to eat. There are other women selling alcohol in the lines, they do not see our pain. If they do not sell alcohol in the lines, our men will not drink. They will not go into Tientsin to buy alcohol because they are afraid of the police. Can you bring the police?”

Uncertain as to what to say, I tell her that I am only researching gendered labour.

She asks me what the point is if I am not going to do anything about the women’s problems. “When I tell people my troubles, they carry tales to my husband so I get beaten. Why can’t you do something? Today is advance day and the money lender will collect my salary because when my husband takes a loan it is I who end up paying.” As other women begin to filter in, she leaves abruptly not wanting to be seen speaking to me.

Incidents related to alcoholism and interlinked domestic violence, are frequent. While some gruesome episodes involved young women being molested by drunken husbands, others were horrific instances of forced incestuous rape. Known through the euphemism thanni podarda (drinking water), alcohol is a menacing agent in the relationship between sexes.

Women anticipate that the management will enforce an alcohol ban, as alcoholism adds an ominous layer to the gender inequity manifesting as a prop for domestic violence. It also plays a mediatory role in men’s social engagements.

Selladorai, an older labourer tells me “It’s like refusing a meal. If you invite me to have a meal with you, and I refuse, it looks ugly on you and me both. So we will eat together. It is the same when it comes to drinking together.”

—

Male and female alcoholism in Sri Lanka’s plantations, hand in hand with the brewing of illegal liquor has become a grave problem that goes terribly unnoticed. This post isn’t by any measure an outcry against the vices of alcoholism, but to highlight that its ominous role in fuelling domestic violence must not be underplayed, particularly in the case of abuse and violence against women in the private sphere of the home.

I suppose the gravest predicament is not the lack of awareness or the evils of alcohol abuse, but the resonating silence and implicit acceptance that it is in the nature of men or worse, part and parcel of being a woman.

Say something. Do something, today.

White Skin, Black Masks

There is a particular violence in Frantz Fanon’s polemic on race and decolonisation.

Both ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ (1952) and ‘The Wretched Earth’ (1961) controversially deliberated the inferiority complex of blackness in a white world, examining the psyche of colonisation and pugnaciously advocating a cleansing violence. The thoughts in this post were largely inspired by this paradox of black skins and white masks that marks how race is perceived by both the self and the other. Although, I feel the age of political correctness is perhaps behind us (As made evident by virtually any episode of 30 Rock)- are we so optimistic that race in cinema is immaterial, or is it still insidiously informing orientalist stereotypes of otherness?

Race and violence in cinema have been as multifaceted and complex as the colonial experience, where differences of race, ethnicity and nationality – with a healthy dose of villainised Eastern Bloc rasps in the cold war decades and breathy Middle-Eastern whispers in the post 9-11 years – have been conflated with cinematic identities of wickedness. Save for the psychokiller genre that focuses most exclusively on deranged white men or Charlize Theron, baddies come with accents, bred from the irrational evils that oppose wholesome Western do-gooding (Or do I mean American hegemony?) and maniacally seek world domination. Of course the dashing American hero (unless of course it’s Bond, James Bond with his wicked smooth British vowels) will save the world, a stunning empowered heroine and perhaps even a bright-eyed, quippy child from  unspeakable evils or a nuclear holocaust. Blue sky and sunshine unless there’s a sequel involved.

Have colonial race politics set the precedent for how race is represented along caricatured stereotypes in cinema?

D.W Griffiths’ epic Birth of a Nation (1915) (although extremely cinematically significant, it is the vilest piece of racist fecal matter in existence aside from being painfully long) that details the heroism of the Ku Klux Klan. If you haven’t seen it, yes, you did read right- the heroism  of the KKK in the pro-confederacy American South during the civil war against aggressive African-American men (played by white actors in blackface).

So does evil come with an ethnic/racial identity? Often I believe it isn’t a stretch to admit that it does.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing and interrogating portrayals of race in cinema, which plays with the construction and deconstruction of African-American identities like a clever kitty (or a cool cat) with a ball of rainbow yarn, is found in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000). A biting satire centered on a modern-day minstrel show featuring black actors in blackface, and the violence that ensues is a truly marvelous and intelligent piece of cinema.  Blackface forms a common thread in both Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled, despite the many decades and racial and political ideologies that separate the films. Bamboozled deals with the offensiveness and Fanonesque racial inferiority complex of the makeup phenomenon that originated a caricature of blackness as a racial identity in minstrel shows and Vaudeville.

I watched The Devil’s Double (2011) last week, featuring Dominic Cooper in an exceptional double role as the tortured political decoy Latif Yahia and the sadistic playboy Uday Hussein, the son of America’s ex-Public Enemy Number One, Saddam Hussein. I’m not going to deliberate the successes and fails of the film- it was quite excellent as far as Dominic Cooper’s performance goes and worth watching.

However, what I would like to draw attention to the less than Iraqi (Or well a broad umbrella of middle-eastern or a narrower Arab?)  cast that won critical acclaim for playing an entirely Iraqi cast (Ok so the female protagonist Sarrab was Lebanese, played unconvincingly by French actress Ludivine Sagnier). Don’t  get me wrong here, Dominic Cooper deserved every bit of the praise. His performance as the swarthy Uday Hussein was particularly arresting. However, what exactly does this fluidity of race, ethnicity and nationality mean? Particularly when the gradients of colours and inflections only believably turn darker?

Ultimately, this post isn’t an argument on cinema and race politics, but rather a query.

We have the great insult of blackface in cinema stirred by historical productions such as Birth of a Nation or satirical critiques such as Bamboozled. We have seen further fluidity of race on cinema as seen in Lawrence of Arabia (1962)  (and so on) with Peter O’ Toole and Alec Guiness flouncing about the desert in yet another epic bit of film. Today, we have an English actor convincingly playing the psychopathic son of an Iraqi dictator.

I suppose the question is, are we post-race where the best man does the job? Or are we harking back to an insulting precedent when racial politics permeated the cinema screen? After all, the reverse wouldn’t be entirely convincing- for then we would have White Chicks (2004), The Sequel.

Does villainy still have a colour and an accent?

Finding ‘Home’ in the South Asian Novel

‘South Asian literature’ populated my early teenage years very sparsely; the only names I can recall being the standard R.K. Narayan fare like the English Teacher and Malgudi Days or E. M. Forster’s Passage to India (which I happen to detest) and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book made tolerable by song and dance Disney renditions (I really brought down the post’s tone, now didn’t I?). These weren’t quite my cup of tea- vaguely interesting enough but never books I sought after.

However, truth was that South Asian fiction barely existed as a genre as it does now.

In an age marked by the diaspora experience, where lives exist, as my friend Bronte (quoting a line from a talk by the fabulous Pico Iyer at the’09 Galle Literary Festival) often fondly describes as ‘the corridors between cultures’. We’re intrigued and curious, much like the colonials were of exotic travelogues, about what binds us and separates us across cultures. The thread of shared human emotion and conflict being a trendy spin on reconciling worlds of difference. (Is diaspora fiction the new para-ethnography?)

The late 1990s however, saw a shift from ‘world literature’ as one penned by a handful of genteel colonised elites who’d mastered the colonisers’ tongues to a genre of its own right as concepts of home, culture and identity became significant markers of self within the flux of globalisation. My own obsession with diaspora fiction and South Asian literature did not begin until I too had packed up and left Sri Lanka, on my rite of passage pilgrimage to the hallowed halls of university. Home became something I would become interested in, beyond a roof over my head- because, I suppose if university teaches you anything it’s the ability to separate house from home.

It was a veritable magic lantern as it were, of thoughts, images and even geopolitical ideologies. To me, South Asian literature came to represent home, and given the explosion of the genre, I guess it did the same for many others to.

Thus, a series featuring of my favourite South Asian reads seemed necessary.

1) The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I find Arundhati Roy’s political opinions rather distasteful at times, however, there is no denying that Roy possesses a skill with the pen (or typewriter, or keyboard) that few writers do. Her work was arguably among  the pioneers of the South-Asian literary surge. The writing is stunning and Roy’s ability to create profound meanings out of casual repetitions spins literary magic that leaps off her pages with a Kathakali primo uomo‘s liquid, eloquent grace.

I first picked up my mother’s copy of the book sometime in the late 90s, when I was well, not even a teenager and needless to say, read a few pages and got very bored and forgot all about it until sometime in the late 2000s. Although, I am still conflicted about how the book ended, the writing was without exaggeration beautiful and emotive.

Tracing the tragic events that unfold in a Keralan Syrian-Christian household in 1969, a forbidden love and two untimely deaths shape the paths of fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel.  Roy’s characters are beautifully formed through their relationships to other characters, speaking with meditations and actions in a novel that depends very little on dialogue. Roy conveys the misery and human consequences of India’s caste-riddled social injustices, navigating the predicaments of gender, class, communist politics, divorce and single motherhood as endured by Rahel and Estha’s Ammu.

The book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in discovering a fantastic piece of literature.

2) The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

I LOVE this book. One of my all-time favourites, both as a film and book, Jhumpa Lahiri skillfully captures with unadorned yet lovely prose, the multi-faceted nature of the immigrant experience.

Somewhat of a wunderkind in the South Asian literary circles, Lahiri secured the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 with her debut collection of short stories ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ (also an excellent read drawing major influence from another must-read Romesh Gunasekera’s Monkfish Moon). Her works focus largely on the complexities of migration, third culture and the entanglement of identity, family and human emotion.

The Namesake chronicles a tale that lies at the nexus of home, dislocation, identity and the significance of names in such uncertainty, following the journey of the Ganguly family from Calcutta to Masachusetts. Ashok, Ashima, Gogol (or Nikhil as we come to know him) and Sonia face their own conflicts entrapped in these culture corridors, always in the peripheries of being at home, but never quite achieving its comfort. Ashima is a beautifully written character, who carries with her a perpetual sad nostalgia for her desh left behind. Ashok attempts to come to terms with the accident that defined his life and journey away from India, while their son Gogol struggles against his parents’ Indian beliefs, the dilemma of his Russian name and its painful link to his father’s past, and carving out his own American identity as Nikhil.

So, if you’re looking for something to read this weekend… Or are faraway and looking to find home.

Remembering The Help

The Help has generated glorious buzz among readers and film buffs alike, with the ambitious but ultimately lacklustre cinematic rendition starring the lovely Emma Stone, who is sadly no match for the spunky Miss. Skeeter.

Promising the ‘other side’ of Gone with the Wind (immortalised in the line “Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”), Stockett tells the tale of The Help who populated the peripheries of white Missisipi in the 1960s. The writing is wonderful in its ability to convey the complexity of heartbreak and small joys existing side by side, as these women, both coloured and white, perpetuate and challenge a grey rainbow social injustices.

The book has been met with well-deserved praise, and I shall ramble no further save for saying pick up a copy, if you haven’t already.

I would also however, like to draw attention to the novel’s epilogue that remembers Demetrie, Stockett’s own childhood maid. She writes,

‘I’m, pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississipi, working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask. It was everyday life. It wasn’t something people felt compelled to examine… I have wished, for many years, that I’d been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question.’ (2009:45)

Within this third world island (Or do I mean a politically correct developing world, emerging economy?), labour is cheap and bound to a tradition of devoted ‘help’ that raise the ‘babies’ of wealthier women, wash clothes, draw baths and prepare meals; the kind of dedication that made ‘Sri Lankan’ domestic labour prized beyond its watery borders.

The peripheries of my own existence in Colombo were populated by a steady stream of women and men, mostly if not entirely of Plantation Tamil origin , who transited through our home, for anything from a few weeks, a few months to a few years. Sometimes three generations of the same family, vertical and horizontal relatives flitted through, attending to our meals and laundry.

I would be lying if I said I remembered the names and faces of these umpteen women whose own lives were intimately bound with our own for pockets of time. But several remain deeply ingrained as a part of my childhood.

There was Mallika, a teenager with a mop of curly hair from Kandy, who was a worthy playmate and went on a trip with us to Anuradhapura.

There was Mary from Rathnapura, who watched me when schools were shut at length in the late 90s and adept at frying prawns and letting me sneak ice cubes out of the fridge.

There was Poovathi from Badulla, my sister’s nanny whose incessant aches and pains made me dub her ‘the paper doll’. Her family remained linked to our’s  for many years: son, daughter, husband, a cousin who had a dramatic encounter with ‘spirit possession’ in our living room one night.

There was also Seetha who lasted three days, being intermittently possessed by her dead father severely interfering with her ability to hold down a job. I kid you not.

There was Yogamma, a refugee from Trincomalee whose tragic life we still speak of. She liked me the best, I think of all her counterparts and spared no butter in making me sour dosai. She wanted more than anything to ‘go to Dubai’ as she would say to earn money for her children who had been relegated to a refugee camp in India. Conned by several employment agencies, she died in the Tsunami in 2004 while attempting to claim and sell her family’s land in Trincomalee.

There was Letchumi, a raging but ultimately endearing alcoholic from Rathnapura who lived with us for many years, until she fell off a Jack tree while on leave at home. She thankfully recovered, but her love for the bottle continues.

Presently, there is Kala, the most idiosyncratic of them all and Letchumi’s daughter. A riot around the house, she once garnished coconut chutney with sliced plums, coriander, carrot and one solitary segment of green bean. She is also of the bucket fame, when one morning a group of builders working on our house found her playing Tarzan on a bucket pulley dangling off the roof. We always laugh about that one.

The faces, the names, the stories are numerous. Enlaced but separate, filial but somehow lesser, familiar but never friends.

Within the Sri Lankan context, the relationship between the help and their employers remain as complex and blurred as that of 1960s Mississippi, albeit less about skin colour and more about class and sometimes ethnicity and the injustices, jealousy and resentment that arise from these socio-economic and cultural differences.

Two Sri Lankan writers, whose books I don’t love but certainly consider worth reading, explore the snarled threads that tie nonas, mahaththayas and babas into convoluted relationships of dominance, reciprocity and even wickedness.

In A Disobedient Girl, Ru Freeman captures the interplay between patronising generosity and resentment, between Latha, an orphan deemed to a life of perpetual servanthood , and Thara, the baby of the privileged Vithanage household.

I could not bring myself to sympathise with any of the characters, who I found to be overwhelmingly selfish. I did not care for the plot revolving around the mysterious connection between Latha and Biso, a wronged woman fleeing to safety with her children.

However,

Freeman does succeed tremendously in portraying the sexual politics and tangled struggle of human emotion seeded in the soil of class prejudice; a socio-economic terra firma that both nourishes and poisons the actions of those entrapped in inflexible social hierarchies. Freeman’s account is moving and insightful, allegorically representing relationships of servitude, upper hands and curious unspoken friendships that are all too familiar to those of us who were fed, cleaned and watched over by women and girls not much older.

Karen Roberts‘ The Lament of a Dhobi Woman is not a great piece of literary fiction by a long shot, detailing the life of Seelawathi, a village girl brought into an exploitative and demeaning equation within a Colombo household. However, what it lacks in skilled prose and plot, it somewhat makes up for in its observations on the fractured nature of Sri Lankan society.

The author positions the book as a sort of exposé ‘to shame people into changing their behaviour‘ (2010:288), which in my opinion impacts Roberts’ character development negatively, with an almost unequivocal demonisation of the proverbial ‘Colombo set’, save for the innocent untouched by the wickedness or sociality.

I suppose, the point of this post- aside from a few recommended reads- is to remember, to wonder about those very women whose lives are in most ways no different to those of the real-life Abileens and Minnys from half a century and several continents apart. They toil, raise children and be enmeshed into the most private spheres of those people who will never acknowledge them as equals.

I wonder the same thing Stockett does, the questions it never once occurred to me to ask.

“We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.” (Kathryn Stockett, The Help)

Six.

Six.

The quirkydorable best friend from Blossom (remeber the 90s? Those were the good old days).

Degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

A  cricket boundary of the nail-biting, still hopeful, game-changing variety.

And the number of years I’ve blogged when we hit the 4th of November- granted, writing hasn’t quite been a priority this year.

Six years ago in 2005 (feels a little too much like the episode intros to How I Met Your Mother, but I shall go with it anyway..) I wrote on a rainy afternoon like this one, complaining about a Swim Gala being held the day before the SATs in my last year of high school.

My goodness, how time flies.

I was deliberating university applications, SAT scores and the possible consequences of not attending said swimathon on my PE grade. Although, I squirm as I read the 2 paragraphs typed out by my 16 year old hands, 6 years, one expatriation to Britain, St. Andrews Social Anthropology, Cambridge International Development and one repatriation back to Colombo later, I feel like far more than 6 years has trundled by. Although the possibility of standardised testing still looms with perhaps having to succumb to the GRE soon, preoccupation with PE grades and being athletically uninclined seem distant.

Having finally left the academic bubble (well hopefully temporarily), it seemed necesssary that the blog be revived (under a new guise) lest the desire to churn out essays fizzles out as I *sanityforbid* end up a corporate drone!

So here’s to penning down thoughts. A Magic Lantern of the everyday: society, arts, culture and other imponderabilia.