stuff i see

let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.

picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.

every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.

i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.

i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.

i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.

i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.

or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.

ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.

remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?

i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.

and now look at it.

i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?

if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.

When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:

“Your regulations are written in blood.”

These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to. 

They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. 

Can I say it again, for those not paying attention? 

#BLACKLIVESMATTER

It has been a just over a week since the brutal and senseless murder of George Floyd. Alongside several truths being highlighted once again, such as the deep seated racism, injustice and prejudice toward the black community, it has become even MORE evident that our own community have a lot of work, education and unlearning to do so that so we can become strong allies and supporters of the black community. There is so much deep-rooted and frighteningly hidden racism embedded not only in our families and culture but also within ourselves. We must unlearn these behaviours and attitudes because they are costing black people their dignity, humanity and their LIVES. It’s important to remember that although educating our families, communities and unlearning is crucial and will lead to change, we must also take action by donating, signing, writing to our MPs and ultimately, agitating the system that has allowed black lives to be killed and their killers to walk free. Here are some links to signpost you toward engaging with and supporting the #BLACKLIVESMATTER movement. Some are educational resources, and others are links to donate to help the family of George Floyd and relevant organisations. 

DONATE: 

 (1) Contribute toward funeral costs and support the family of George Floyd

(2) Donate toward the Ahmaud Arbery fund, a 25 year old boy who was chased and shot senselessly this February.

(3) Support the #BLACKLIVESMATTER movement.

EDUCATE: 

 (1) READ: a comprehensive folder compiled by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan including many resources on unlearning anti-blackness in South Asian communities. Also, follow @Southasians4blacklives on Instagram to view and share important infographics. 

 (2) Check out this list of children’s books with focusing on supporting conversations around race, resistance and prejudice. 

(3) A compendious guide filled with links and PDFs to educate you from a guide on how to discuss anti-blackness at home, to articles about racial justice, the myth of reverse racism and many more. 

CHANGE: 

 (1) Sign this petition to get ALL of the officers involved in the senseless murder of George Floyd charged.  

 (2) A brilliant thread on how to be an ALLY. Share with your communities so we can change ourselves and our communities:  

 (3) Sign the petition to DEFUND the police.

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 There are also many important links, petitions and funds we can all collectively support, and this is by no means a complete list. Please do share below any petitions, websites, funds, social media accounts and resources that we can all use, too. 

Rest in peace George Floyd, and the hundreds of thousands of people brutally murdered as a result of racial injustice. If we all work together, change is on the horizon. 

NEVER HAVE I EVER - NETFLIX SERIES - TWO-BROWNGIRLS THINKS

If you’ve not seen ‘Never Have I Ever’ on Netflix yet, you’ve either been perfecting a new, obscure, artistic hobby or living under your duvet for the past two months of quarantine. Both of which are perfectly acceptable by the way, #selfcarefirst. But this new show has been causing quite a stir in the BROWNGIRL community and beyond that too. Yes, that’s right, white people have watched a 10-part, teen comedy/drama series with a young American Indian girl as the protagonist. It’s been number 1 on Netflix around the world, which is a pretty big deal. That’s why we thought we should write about it. Here are our thoughts…

1. They tried

From our brief but adequately thorough research on the making of ‘Never Have I Ever’, it’s clear that Mindy Kaling’s intentions were good. First of all, the whole idea for the series came about when Netflix approached Mindy Kaling and asked if she would create a show about her childhood. This perspective may explain a lot of the seemingly awkward encounters that Devi (the main character) has with Indian/Hindu culture. As Mindy explains in a telling interview with NY Times, 

“There was a comment on Twitter saying, “Oh, great that is totally not how Hindu girls talk.” And I remember being incensed because when my mom used to make us pray before we took the SATs, or before we got on a plane, and I didn’t know all the different names of the gods because no one had taught me.”

Although we’d love Devi to embrace her culture (duh, that’s what Two-BrownGirls is all about!), we accept that it is a journey and a process that’s different for everyone. The moment when she meets a brown guy at Ganesh Puja who explains that only when he went away from home for college did he actually realise that his heritage made him unique, resonated a lot with us. Maybe making this series is a part of Mindy Kaling’s own journey to understanding her identity too?

2. Representation, Relatability and Responsibility

As the conversation around representation on mainstream media continues to simmer, our understanding of artistic freedom has to be incorporated too. The creators of the series were trying to follow an American teen comedy/drama template while pushing the needle on diversity - not an easy task. Think, Mean Girls meets Bend it Like Beckham, you’d think it could go either one of two ways. That’s why ‘Never Have I Ever’ has some teething problems that we think we all (creators included) need to settle into. For example, going too hard on the ‘sex-thirsty’ narrative jarred with us (Devi hadn’t even kissed anyone yet!). Handling Hindu narratives within the context of the Indian political climate and briefly incorporating a character who was ostracised by her whole community for marrying a Muslim are areas that writers of a show this mainstream need to take more responsibility for. 

3. Stereotypes much?

Ok, we need to talk about the accents. We thought it was just us but quickly realised that most other people had been finding Kamala’s and Devi’s mum’s grating and their characters two-dimensional. I mean, even Mallika Dua posted her frustration on Instagram stating that ‘no one from India talks like Apu Nahasapeemapetilon’. We honestly thought that some aspects of Kamala’s character, particularly her aloof-ness, were quite insulting to people from India. Man, talk about widening the NRI divide.

There’s been a lot of controversy around diasporic portrayals of Indian elders, particularly when it comes to Lilly Singh’s ‘parent’ characters which dehumanise their experience. This is a careful line that comedy treads. Often it’s most effectively executed when the stereotypes are used to make a social or political statement or change a point of view such as in a number of Goodness, Gracious Me’s sketches. ‘Never Have I Ever’ was trying to lean this way but the character portrayals and accents need more fleshing-out and nuance. 

4. Hopes

There’s no news of a season two yet but the series does end on quite a cliff-hanger that leaves a lot of people wanting more! With all the media coverage and heated debates in the brown diaspora, it’s clear that there is an appetite for the show to carry on. It’s great to see mainstream representation and if there is a second season, it would be awesome to see Kaling explore South Asian identity in a more complex and nuanced way. We also hope that there’s room for an interesting non-white love interest, that Devi and her mum work it out and that Kamala moves out! 

The creative team behind the show are well aware of their responsibility with how much of a step forward this is for diversity and we find Maitreyi so endearing that it’s hard to be too harsh. 

We hope that Mindy Kaling takes on board the feedback from her target audience and uses it to inform some of her decisions moving forward. In her own words, “Those people who watch the show, particularly young Indian-American women, are the people that I want to like it the most. And they’re the ones that are going to be the toughest on me. So it’s one of the biggest things I care about now as an artist.”

There is a definite inbalance between the expectations of an Indian girl being married and an Indian boy.

For starters, teach your boys to be men.