alex

“every time i walked the tightrope, my dad stood there holding the net”

like, i spotted the robin/ramy’s subtext immediately. i hadn’t expected it and was delighted. but, aside from a few moments (robin’s “absurd impulse” to touch ramy’s cheek while he speaks; the “don’t you know?” line at the ball) the subtext remains just that: subtext. they COULD—if you REALLY wanted to do so—be read as Genuinely Platonic Best Friends. it’s a neglectful reading, but, as the op points out, these two boys genuinely never get CLOSE to breaching the subject of their feelings because there are such bigger fish to fry. robin internally acknowledges it a single time (when letty says “you and him” and robin thought she meant him & ramy when she had actually meant him & professor lovell) and never again. such a huge part of letty’s humiliation is that ramy chose robin over her and would do so again at any given chance—but it’s not at all in a queer way. it’s because of their closeness as friends and fellow men of color in their institution, which will always supersede any romantic feelings. queerness simply does not have any significant part in this whole equation.

there's so much to it both contextually with ramy's character as well as historically. contextually because ramy is fluent in 6 languages, an insane number of languages for one person but none of which are his mother tongue. he's described as a performer, one who knows he can't blend in so instead he stands out as a means to escape as much of the racism as he can. he gets lost in it that he almost forgets who he is; this is reflected in his language ability too – he gets so lost in his linguistic academics he just barely remembers the native language of his home place that he adores.

and honestly, you can't even really blame ramy for it at all when it was induced. it's the british who saw urdu, arabic and persian as more valuable than bangla, it's the british that make ramy put on this act so he can literally stay alive. and when you know the historical relevancies between urdu and bangla, it hurts so much that ramy was forced to forget bangla

very brief history context: after the partition, where british india was split into india, pakistan and east pakistan (now bangladesh) bangla was seen as inferior to urdu due to its hindu connections. bengalis experienced so much shit because of this (and bengali muslims are still dealing with the internalised cultural racism today honestly). pakistanis tried to make the official language urdu, even though literally everyone in east pakistan were bengali and spoke bangla, so bengalis fought back against it. we still celebrate that day today (feb 21)

so to have ramy be in this position in the 1830s where urdu was seen as superior to bangla, especially when ramy is a bengali muslim, is just extremely accurate?? and maybe it's bc we don't have much western literature where we talk about this but it's just so nice to have it acknowledged

But my first thought after reading letty's chapter is she did not mention victoire, not even once. After everything she learned, after everything victoire told her, she still failed to realize that everything she experienced, victoire also did—even worse. Victoire, the friend that she spent the most time with, was not only discriminated against because she's a woman, she was also discriminated against because she's not white. After everything, letty only sees the advantages robin and ramy had for being men, refusing to see all the ways society was shunning victoire. this isn't the oppression olympics ofc, but how can she not see victoire's pain? how can she only see robin's and ramy's privelege. how can she fail to acknowledge victoire's struggles and pain until the very end. how can letty, despite being victoire's friend, refuse to see her pain just because she refuses to acknowledge her own privelege.

that’s ramy’s word, not hers. but she uses it knowingly. she knows the power of words, of language, of translation, and yet she’s choosing to steal a word that’s not hers, a word that has meaning and history and love, a word that not even victoire dared use bc she knew it wasn’t hers, that it belonged to ramy and robin alone, all for her own advantage.

she tried to connect with him the ways robin could, by talking abt his foreign land, by "appreciating" him ("but your skin is lovely—"), mimicking his banter with robin (constantly going against every mundane opinion he had in an effort to tease him) but she could never see how she was constantly hurting him by never listening to him, by putting down his feelings of britain's settlement in india, by her utter ignorance to the group's collective experiences