{"id":56439,"date":"2018-05-19T23:46:57","date_gmt":"2018-05-19T23:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56439"},"modified":"2018-05-19T23:48:36","modified_gmt":"2018-05-19T23:48:36","slug":"in-the-wake-of-his-damage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56439","title":{"rendered":"In the Wake of His Damage"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Wake of His Damage<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Rumpus<\/a>
\n2018-05-12<\/p>\n

Shreerekha<\/strong><\/a>
\nNew York, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nRumpus original art by Aubrey Nolan<\/a><\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

All the sleeping women<\/em>
\nAre now awake and moving.<\/em>
\n\u2013 Yosano Akiko<\/a> (1911)<\/em><\/p>\n

For all women who already know this narrative;<\/em>
\nFor all women touched by the Great Writers, named, unnamed, and some listed as letters;<\/em>
\nFor all who commune in the trauma and healing promised herein;<\/em>
\nFor all who believe in the power of radical transgressive border-crossing love;<\/em>
\nFor my Happiness, and my son and my daughter, so that you may walk differently;<\/em>
\nFor the ex with whom love remains the last transgression \u2014<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Autobiographical<\/strong><\/p>\n

The year after I started teaching in Texas<\/a>, his novel<\/a> came out. Ten years after the event of our relationship, ten tortured years where we continued to communicate, a sort of communication that involved him reaching out, letting me know I made all the wrong decisions in my life, and then, asking for forgiveness and another chance, I thought I should teach his novel in my classes. The novel itself was important, won the Pulitzer<\/a>, and by teaching it enough times, I thought it would do the trick. The classroom is sacral: all that goes through it turns magical and I would emerge whole. I would finally be rid of my ghost-love and I could sanitize our past through the distance offered by teaching and making a monument of his work for my students. Somehow, that plan failed.<\/p>\n

What I do is teach, write, and think on, most often, feminist texts and theories. Such a pedagogy has not just carried me through the classrooms over the decades, but become a mooring post in life. It offers me a vision and a strategy, a way to love radically, think fearlessly, and keep renewing, as I can, the bridges between projects of feminism and social justice. Gloria Anzaldua\u2019s<\/a> vision, a vision that has carried many a woman through a dark day, has been valuable in thinking through the rubble of this event in my life. In Borderlands<\/em><\/a>, Anzaldua offers a prophetic amalgam that helps women identify the productive potential of the mestiza<\/em><\/a> way, the middle spaces she calls the nepantla<\/em>. For women of the many elsewheres, women who continually travel and cross borders, Anzaldua\u2019s psychic restlessness gives a fist bump<\/a> of legitimacy, an anchor in the cultural collisions many of us remain mired in. Rather than a counter stance, she speaks of developing a position that is inclusive, inaugurating for us the amasamiento<\/em>, a creature of both light and darkness.<\/p>\n

I identify in a category not formalized or accepted in colonial census charts or western ways of understanding the other, as a black South Asian. I am an Indian who lays claim to the global community of black consciousness, and I reside between so many worlds of belonging and unbelonging. In racializing colorism and politicizing my own experience of antipathy witnessed toward the color of my skin, I crafted my own passport into marooned and shapeshifting black communities that gave credence to ontologies and a posteriori narratives over normative constructions of race, ethnicities, and nationalities…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The year after I started teaching in Texas, his novel came out. Ten years after the event of our relationship, ten tortured years where we continued to communicate, a sort of communication that involved him reaching out, letting me know I made all the wrong decisions in my life, and then, asking for forgiveness and another chance, I thought I should teach his novel in my classes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,395,8,20,25],"tags":[28682,14306],"class_list":["post-56439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-shreerekha","tag-the-rumpus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56440,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56439\/revisions\/56440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}