Annalise Keating

Annalise Keating is a lesson in how not to apologize for wanting power and definitely not for having it. It’s easy to want to tear people down like her, especially when they’ve built their lives from scratch and must keep doing it over and over not because they fall so many times but because they are made to. History has shown no dearth of weak people who can’t stand watching someone of not the right color, caste, or face standing up there. And this is why Keating is such a reward to watch no matter how many times she falls, lies, fails, weeps, and picks herself up. In the end, she still stands.

There are many things about binge-watching a TV show that I am wary about. To begin with, I am uneasy with who I become: who knowingly puts her days on hold and acts as if she’s been given an extra life from watching an ad on candy crush. It doesn’t help that when I’m on a Netflix spree, I am also imagining how great my life is going to be after I finish the damn show. How I will make time at the end of every day, no matter how unwilling I am, how sleepy, to sit in front of the mirror and braid my hair, lotion my hands, put the phone away and read a book. It’s amusing no? That the people we spend days and weeks watching, listening, and soaking in aren’t on their phones and computers all the time?

While I continue to thrive on borrowed life and act as if I can return to the main one any minute I want, I don’t want to leave Annalise. So once the show is over, instead of moping around wondering what happened to her, I take her with me.

Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat? ~Assata Shakur

I love Annalise Keating for many things. I like that she isn’t honest or likable. It’s reassuring to watch a black woman on screen who doesn’t take her suffering and turn it into kindness. She lets the suffering eat into her and remain in her body where it becomes anger, grows into bitterness, freezing her in despair. She spits fire when threatened, laughs thunder when she wants to, burns you with ice-cold logic when you attack her. She shows us parts of her she coerces into being liked by others, as well as parts she couldn’t and later wouldn’t. A term often used to describe the experience of watching women like her is ‘raw’ –but a better word would be surviving, I guess. The same word she uses to describe herself in the end.

I wonder what it’s like to have that kind of vision to imagine a life where you will not allow the color of your skin, the smell of your caste to determine how you will be seen by the world; and the grit to go and get it. She won’t be a hero. She isn’t interested in the medals of honor you want to garland her with for her victories, it’s perhaps why she doesn’t pine for people when she is in pain either. You like putting her on pedestals, your problem. She didn’t ask you to do that. She was just working. I’ve been thinking a lot about work and what it means to be disliked at the workplace. I’ve often been witness to watching the most hard working people be loathed by those who don’t work half as much. It’s not easy to love Annalise Keating, says Eve at her funeral. But it’s what made her the strong, stubborn, badass lawyer she worked hard to be.

In the entire series, the only time we see Annalise talking to herself is in the final episode, where she wonders what to wear for the last day of her trial, the day of the verdict. She must choose between wearing something that can make it easier for the jury to declare her not guilty or something that will say ‘if you need my clothes and hair to prove my innocence, then fuck you.’ It was a revelation to hear her speak to herself. As it was to watch her mother, Ophelia keep the Anna Mae Harkness in Annalise alive. Ophelia on her own is a whole other show.

In court, Annalise is often told not to use the ‘race card’ and I think about how there is a deliberate yet subtle inattention to the fact of her as a black woman lawyer in her imagination of herself. In the beginning, there is something supremely regular and ordinary about the way she goes about her life. She shows you what it’s like to not have race hovering over you at all times, even though there is no escape from it. How people can have the potential to blossom despite the threat of it always holding them back. Eventually the inattention is avenged- they hunt her down and make her pay for it. But still, she rises.

The one card that we should be using is the card we don’t often want to use even if we aren’t left with any other cards. I don’t know if it’s because we want you to see that the card is actually for you, not us. Or because we know we are still of value without race/caste unlike you who will fall like a sack of onions without yours. And that’s how Annalise wins her fight. She throws your card in your face and becomes Anna Mae Harkness.

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Dear Toni

I broke down in class last week when I was reading out this piece by a student. I haven’t wept in class before. I have caught myself just short of breaking down (sometimes unsuccessfully) while saying goodbye to students in the last class. But never like this, never in the middle of reading a piece. Maybe I wouldn’t have broken down if the piece wasn’t written by a student. Maybe I wouldn’t have broken down if she had never sat in my classes, if I had never watched her write, if I didn’t know what she was talking about. But I did, and I do. I am making excuses after all. I have always cried after reading her, sometimes privately, and now I can say publicly as well. She wrote things that aren’t easy to write. I cried because she was walking around with everything she hadn’t written until she wrote that piece, I cried because I don’t know what else she is still carrying.

I could have stopped reading, told the students to read it on their own, switched my camera off and composed myself. But I kept going, I don’t know why. I think she made me keep going. And I pray she keeps me going.

I once cried at Meta when a girl student had yelled at me under the banyan tree in college. I didn’t know what to do. But I just kept thinking, if I were a man, or a tall & pretty Savarna teacher with perfect teeth, sharp nose, and bright wide eyes, I wouldn’t be crying under the banyan tree. Maybe I would, I don’t know – but it’s unfair – this desire to know what it would’ve been like if I was Savarna. After all, how often does a Savarna teacher spend time thinking about what it’s like to be a Dalit teacher?

And also – I don’t like feeling that way. Because I know that if I were Savarna, I wouldn’t have been able to read Beloved the way I did and let it live inside me like it now does. There is a reason you write the way you do and when I’d finished reading Beloved, I felt closer to you in a way I wouldn’t have been able to feel if I were Savarna.

I don’t know if I’d have not cried if it were a boy yelling at me, not a girl. Because boys and their words have a way of hiding behind my teeth and making me angry and sour, never sad. The girl returned after months with two roses and an apology. I smiled and accepted all three. Then I wondered if I shouldn’t have, then I was happy that I had. Will I ever reach a stage where I’ll be confident about the choices I’ve made? Will I ever know what to do immediately? Will I ever have it in me to not cry, not be angry? But why should I not cry? What will I do with all that strength it takes to not cry? Where in my body will I keep so much strength? So much self-respect? So much control? I don’t have that much space in my body for that kind of control.

***

I have been waking up early, not to write oh but how I wish I could. I have been waking up early to look at the sky and think of you. I had read that you woke at 4 to make coffee and watch the light come. It’s how you knew that you were ready to write each day. That you didn’t have to be in the light, you had to be there before the light with coffee to know you were ready to write. I loved the sound of that so much that I have been waking early to watch the sun come up, to look at the way it touches the tree outside my door, and to think of you. Thinking of you makes me want to get ready to write.

I don’t know how it’s possible but your belief in storytelling, in the stories your parents told you, about themselves, and the world is how I see mine. I think it’s not easy for Savarna people to understand this or to even take this seriously. And I am learning to live with that. Because their inability to see love and stories makes me never want to give up on myself.

Today, I woke at 4:30 from a dream I wanted to urgently return to so I went back to finish it (Possessed teddy bear-owl with flapping, beating wings is going nuts in my room. Doesn’t leave me alone so I dump it in the trash outside. It becomes a baby and sits on the windowsill cackling at me before jumping to its death and returning again to my bedroom to haunt me. Basically this is Clifford Geertz + Mixer Week + Google Meet+ Online classes)

And when I woke up again, it was 5:59 and I felt like the day was already over, that I was too late. Then I really woke up, told myself to fuck off and begin the day (take trash out, bring milk, put it to boil, put bread in the oven, boil water, make coffee)

After that crying episode, I was afraid the students wouldn’t take my classes seriously anymore. That because of this ’emotional’ outburst, I have shown them that my intellectual relationship with the subject at hand (Resisting caste) has been compromised.

But then I thought, wtf – a teacher moved to tears because of something her student has written is nothing to be ashamed of. If there are teachers who have cried teaching Shakespeare, then A. Suresh is no less than Shakespeare. But it will be used against me, I know that. Someday, when I am least expecting it, it is going to come back and bite me.

So yes, bite me.

“I am not interested in happiness. Not yours, nor mine nor anybody’s. I don’t think we can afford it anymore. I don’t think it delivers the goods. Most important, it gets in the way of everything worth doing. Happiness has become a bankrupt idea, the vocabulary of which is frightening: money, things, protection, control, speed, and more. I’d like to substitute something else for its search. Something urgent, something neither the world nor you can continue without. I assume you have been trained to think- to have an intelligent encounter with problem-solving. It’s certainly what you will be expected to do. But I want to talk about the step before that. The preamble to problem-solving. I want to talk about the activity you were always warned against as being wasteful, impractical, hopeless. I want to talk about dreaming. Not the activity of the sleeping brain, but rather the activity of a wakened, alert one. Not idle wishful speculation, but engaged, directed daytime vision. Entrance into another’s space, someone else’s situation, sphere. By dreaming, the self permits intimacy with the Other without the risk of being the Other. And this intimacy that comes from pointed imagining should precede our decision-making, our cause-mongering, our action. We are in a mess, you know; we have to get out, and only the archaic definition of the word “dreaming” will save us: “to envision; a series of images of unusual vividness, clarity, order, and significance.”

~Toni Morrison~

When I read this from your Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address, I had a warm desire to hear you and Babasaheb talk to each other. I grew hungry to have you both in my belly, walk into a classroom and roar, walk to my table and write my heart out.

Someday, it will happen. I can feel it gathering in my fingertips.

Image credits: Speakola

Featured image credits: nytimes.com

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.

Y for Yearning

Chimamanda Adichie was once complimented for not using difficult words in her stories — for writing in ‘simple’ English. She laughed her watermelon laugh and said ‘Thank you very much but that’s probably because I don’t know difficult words.’ I like to imagine that the interviewer bit their tongue and did not recover.

Reading Americanah was patting that low grumble in my stomach that is hungry to have written, never to write. It was feeling grateful for Adichie and her ‘simple’ words that brought me Ifemelu, the writer who came into being because she started blogging. It was regarding Ifemelu with a sense of wonder and being in awe of her pauses that allowed her quiet, ceaseless moments of self-respect. And then it was feeling happy for seven years of rumlolarum.com.

Race and Caste are so much the same and so much not. Reading about race is reading about caste and yet there seem to be so many Indians who are more comfortable talking about racism than caste. They don’t know caste, they don’t see caste, they say.
Ifemelu after she returns from America, says that she stopped being Black when the plane touched down in Lagos. Babasaheb said he’d forgotten he was an untouchable in America and that he became one again when he landed in India. I thought of Rajini Krish who wrote about his first time on a plane, and how he described the view from the window as ‘full white, full silence, full powerful, full myth.’ I thought of his struggle, and what he was thinking moments before he took his life.

I thought about Isidore from Togo whom I met last year at an internship program in Seattle. I thought of his hands as he beat his chest with them one day, demonstrating how wildly his heart leaps everytime he tries to speak in class. How I wanted to grab his hands, slow them down and say me too. I thought of Sandra Cisneros’ Salvador whose name the teacher cannot remember. I thought of how dense must someone be to not see the loneliness of others.

In these stories, and in others, I have always yearned to find the perfect sentences to begin writing. But I’m afraid my words aren’t perfect and I’m hungry to make them perfect. What an odd demand it is no? To write perfect about things that aren’t.