Is it THAT hard to leave us alone?

Journalism is no one’s father’s property.

I’ve seen a gate keeping mentality practiced by some journalists in upholding a Brahmanical distinction between what is pure journalism & what isn’t, what is serious hard-core journalism & what is chotabheem journalism.

One of them says ‘writing opinion pieces doesn’t make anybody a journalist.’ This was said in response to a tweet where I’d listed out the Dalit & Bahujan writers, journalists, & activists I’d invited to talk to students (since he was asking for percentages, I gave him names)

Dalit women activists talking about their experiences with upper caste men who threatened them when they were trying to put together a fact finding report about the rape and murders of Dalit women in Haryana and Jharkhand is not journalism?

A Dalit writer talking about Savarna gatekeeping in film writing/criticism is not journalism? A Dalit Transwoman, talking about her struggles with identity & writing her autobiography is not journalism?

A 92-year-old Dalit man talking about his experiences with caste is not journalism? There were Dalit students & teachers who were listening to him that day, hanging on to every word he was saying. He talked fiercely about caste & his school days on a panel with two Dalit students who had read his book, who had never before talked in front of an audience but inspired by the 92 year old man who called himself 29, they talked just as fiercely. This is not journalism?

A Bahujan writer talking about how he began writing, & how he now deals with criticism of his writing is not journalism? It may mean very little to you but having such writers come & talk about their experiences to Dalit students unlocks things that aren’t easy to understand. To begin with, it gives us hope to write & keep writing, even amidst Savarna gate keeping.

As a teacher, I’ve also come across Dalit & Bahujan students who deny caste, become aware of it later & figure out their own ways of negotiating with it. And it is their freedom to do that, as much as it is their freedom to not want anything from me or my work.

Now coming to the actual keeda of the matter, if your question is why wasn’t ‘I’ – self appointed god of journalism- invited – I can perhaps address that differently. But don’t mansplain Dalit women about what journalism is. Some of us have survived without your mentorship all these years, & will perhaps continue to survive. The goal of most writing courses is not as ambitious as producing Pulitzer Prize winners or even hard core journalists.

My goal is to keep students interested in life, in writing, and in wanting to become independent. And again this is subject to what they want to do. If that doesn’t allow me to be a godmother, I am ok with that.

I teach a paper on resisting caste. Students come to the classroom with set ideas about what to expect & find it hard to deal with a paper that isn’t taught like how other Indian literatures are. It has taken time to get to a position where I have the liberty to set a syllabus where I can only put Dalit, Bahujan & Adivasi writers but teaching it hasn’t been easy either. I can only teach that paper emotionally. And students aren’t used to that.

They demand intellectual rigour where I can only offer my own vulnerability. But a paper like this helps Dalit students find themselves & embrace their identities. And this is a big deal for me, even if it means that they don’t go to ACJ after & change the world. Not all uplifted people go to ACJ. Read this piece for some insight – http://www.opendosa.in/shoes-to-fill-a-journey-of-discovery-and-acceptance/

As for the claims that the Dalits who have social capital aren’t doing anything to uplift those who don’t. Best to begin practice at home. And even better if we stop imposing our ideas of upliftment on others. Even Ambedkar didn’t impose. Who are you?

Someday I want to see Dalit writers writing fiction for The New Yorker, I want to see them writing food essays for Gourmet, I want to see them screen their films at every international film festival. Is that wrong? Is it wrong to want those things for myself?

If there weren’t such persistent & dramatic Savarna gatekeeping here, we wouldn’t have to dream internationally. Sometimes our survival doesn’t seek other people’s permission or mentorship. I’ve learnt that the more visible you are, the more irritated they get.

It pisses them off to see that we are writing, teaching, surviving. But Ambedkar taught me to keep working despite who says what & it’s what I’m going to do. If that screws with your plans, Jai Bhim to you.

Some of us are not interested in being champions of revolution nor do we need your awards or rewards. We just want to work. Is it that hard to leave us alone?

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It’s all I got: Keret & Janet

First of all, Etgar Keret’s voice is fun. His ‘eys’ are a delight. Second of all, I want to punch myself for not having read Janet Frame earlier. On a films on writing spree many years ago, I downloaded An Angel at my table but never got around to watching it. Somehow New Zealand seemed distant.

Last year, I found, grabbed, and bought a second hand copy of An Angel at my table at Moe’s books. And that was it. A few days ago, I listened to this New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and felt rescued by Janet Frame.

I am forever grateful to the NYFP series which has given me a range of writers and their worlds to swallow from my Basavanagudi terrace where I water plants & wonder why the color green on my curry leaves is unconvincing.

In this podcast, Keret reads ‘You are now entering the human heart‘ a short story by Janet Frame. It is about a woman watching a museum attendant demonstrating ‘snake handling’ to a class of young children, and their teacher. He invites the reluctant teacher to hold the snake, telling her that the children wouldn’t want to hold the snake if she looked afraid so she must smile and pet the snake. Nothing happens and many things happen.

I read it with Keret’s voice narrating it slowly. In conversation with Deborah Treisman, Keret says that Frame writes to survive. He rarely feels that with other writers. Competence is one thing. “With competence, you can be a con man too. But writing to survive, to finalise something for yourself is something else entirely”

He is open to her writing in a way very few men are to women’s writing.

“I love her short fiction. I think there is something freeing about the way she writes. She doesn’t write for a goal. She just kind of floats or levitates. There is this feeling of zero-gravity I feel when I read her. The reader wants to forget everything and just be. Even though she was less well known than other award winning writers, writing like her wins you peace of mind. When she writes, she wants to figure out what the world and she are all about. She writes to feel less stranger to herself. And that’s something that I feel when I write”

When Treisman asks if that “works” for him, Keret says “Take a leaking roof. If you put a tissue paper and someone asks ‘does it work’? all you can say is ‘it’s all I got”.

When I began reading Keret, I remembered one strange evening in 2014 when I went to Alliance Française to attend the Israeli Film Festival. Some Savarna colleague and her husband were very offended. ‘Don’t you know what’s happening in the world? Why are you not political, blah blah.’

AM had a sharp response. Something about how politically correct Savarnas who are quick to feel offended by what others do, should perhaps also feel offended about living in a country led by a fascist. I noted that when I had said something similar but cruder – said Savarna woman protested, refusing to hear me out. Hearing it from AM, she shut up.

Either way, left to Savarna virtues, I never would have discovered the joy of reading someone like Etgar Keret. VN gave me her copy of The girl on the fridge for my birthday and I haven’t been the same.

Janet Frame had to write in severely threatening circumstances. Here is a bit of trivia:

“Following years of psychiatric hospitalisation, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when, just days before the procedure, her début publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize” (Wikipedia)

Keret’s parents survived the holocaust. A question people continue to ask him is why he chooses to write fiction when he can write about ‘so much more’ – his parents’ survival, the holocaust, and what Israel is doing to the world. I believe these people have never read his work at all.

His fiction is a reminder of what’s possible when we continue to write in zero-gravity through the crushing weight of memories that hold us back. People with opinions will continue to tell others how they should write, live, behave but as long as you keep writing, you don’t even have to raise your middle fingers to them.

Chimmi & Zadie

In love with this stunning partnership, the grace to compliment one another on stage so willfully and mean it, the curiosity about each other’s writing that doesn’t seem scripted for stage and the readiness with which they embrace each other’s work.

And most of all, absolutely delighted that Adichie says this about Zadie:

“How happy I am to share the stage with Zadie. I have admired and followed Zadie’s work from the very beginning, from The White Teeth. And I’ve also really admired that she is this brilliant woman who is also a hot babe. I think it’s really important that brilliant women step out there and be hot babes”

They discuss Americanah, race, racism, the importance of talking about hair, love, romance, writing, and sex. Adichie says that she based Americanah on the many Mills & Boon she read as a child. Such a slap on the faces of people who continue to propagate bullshit about high and low literature.

I like how happy they look. I like how they laugh and make the audience laugh. I like how they aren’t devoting any energy towards private and less private angers. Things white people, publishers, editors may have said but on this stage, they only have eyes and heart for writing.

Franny & Toni

Spent all of last week scrounging through everything Fran Lebowitz wrote and spoke. Read Beloved and came to discover Toni Morrison as a lot closer to me than I’d anticipated. My body is filled with her words and I’m letting them sleep inside as long as I can hold them there. But the better discovery was the close friendship between Fran and Toni. I am feeling an envy that is both happy and relieved. I’m excited to learn the things they said about each other.

Watching Fran is one kind of thrill. Reading Toni and realizing that my best writing years are yet to happen is another kind. Fran arrived in New York, much like Didion did. To write. To learn to write. Fran was barely 17. I want to go too. Discovering these women has made my resolve to see New York stronger. And so much that I don’t give a fuck about wanting to be special. I want to be as hopeful and as plain and as ordinary as those women were before they became famous. I want to see the city and feel the echo of their words in my eyes.

Stitcher is a gift. Here are some fab interviews that I loved by Etgar Keret, Claudia Rankine and Fran Lebowitz.

Keret narrates a funny incident involving his mother who, proud that her son had become a famous writer, made sure to ‘split’ her vegetable shopping just so she could return to the green grocer and say ‘you know my son’s story was published in the New Yorker’ while buying carrots – and then again — ‘you know he teaches in this great American University’ while buying cucumbers.

He says some really interesting things about fiction, something that I am getting more and more terrified of writing.

Claudia Rankine takes me back to my time at Seattle, and that evening we watched ‘Citizen’ performed powerfully on stage. So powerful that for the rest of the evening, I saw nothing but guilt and fear in the eyes of that one severely racist colleague.

I’m itching to write about it even as I gaze lovingly at the other three writing deadlines. Even so, I read this Paris Review Interview of Fran last night and went to bed happy and songful. She’s making me return to reading furiously. She says in an interview “If you want to learn how to write, and your parents are willing to pay obnoxious money to put you through a writing school, take that money, buy lots of books and read. It’s the only way to learn how to write”

In this interview, she says “But really, I read in order not to be in life. Reading is better than life. Without reading, you’re stuck with life”

Gahhhhh.