Posts even remotely serious have been missing from this blog for a while. The Hostilidays take precedence (oh, I will win yet!) and are an enjoyable distraction when my last living grandparent’s health worsens (D and I will visit her again this weekend), what some call Seasonal Affective Disorder is almost in full effect this winter and I want to kick myself for even entertaining malaise when so many are without jobs, food and shelter here in America and abroad. Now is not the time to read non-fiction but it forces me into someone else’s shoes and, momentarily, it’s not all about me and my young, miniscule troubles. What a luxury.
I am well into Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans by Thomas Brothers after finally finishing Emily Raboteau’s wonderful yet deeply troubling essay, Searching For Zion. Raboteau herself is an interesting tale with a white mother, a black religious-historian father, relatives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina and a Jewish best friend who made aliyah back to Israel during very tumultuous times. Like a lot of us, she searches for her identity through analyzing what identity means and her own various avatars in a world that doesn’t yet understand Sorta Culture. You know, as in I’m sorta Indian, sorta Arab, sorta Midwesterner, sorta New Orleanian, sorta American, sorta Hindu, sorta world citizen, sorta everything and learning to be ok with it. She’s sorta white, sorta black, sorta Yankee, sorta Southern, sorta Christian, sorta Jewish and sorta everything, too. The search for identity is not a new phenomenon when you consider, for instance, Louis Armstrong and his life in post-Civil-War New Orleans. He was poor, black, not Creole who consider(ed) themselves culturally superior, could not pass the paper bag test (incidentally, I find it humorous that my skin color falls on either side of that test depending on whether it’s summer or winter) and loved being a marching musician because it allowed such a talented man as himself access into parts of the city people of his hue could not otherwise enter.
Entry. Access. Who is black, who isn’t black? Who is white, who isn’t white enough? Who can enter, who cannot? These questions have been on my mind long before Barack Obama sought and won the office of the American Presidency, but are so immediate now. Do you think it’s over and black people have arrived just because a black couple heads up the White House? Oh no. Growing up brown in Kuwait had many perplexing moments (a topic for another post) which I foolishly thought would go away when I moved to the States. Even so, it took me until a few weeks ago to realize that no matter how brown of Indian descent I am and where I am in the world, no single racial population has it as bad as those of African descent. This is not meant to be insulting or exculpatory, but whatever racism I experienced in Kuwait, the Midwest and the South, be it being called “Hindi” or “dothead” or given looks as if I don’t belong there, is fluff compared to the fact that black people have always had to prove themselves as much more. As human. This is just unpardonable and only surfacing as westerners, in the waning years of the first decade of the 21st century A.D., are forced to look at our race relations in the hairy eyeball.
Emily Raboteau has visited Israel many times and bases her essay on this pull of identity (and push back by the self-ordained) so palpable there. This passage, in which a white Israeli acquaintance recounts the confusion that occurred when he protested alongside a Palestinian for the latter’s right to self-rule, still sticks with me. Apparently neither expected the black Israeli.
“I marched on their side because it was too much like apartheid for my taste. The Israeli soldiers came to stop us. One of them pointed a M16 at my chest. He was Ethiopian. I thought, ‘He could kill me. I might die today. What am I dying for? Which side am I on?’ Do you know what the Palestinian standing next to me said? ‘Look at that filthy kushi who wants to shoot us. I can’t believe it’s come to this. My homeland is being run by monkeys.’ I was scared the Arab would yell ‘Go back to Africa!’ and the soldier would open fire. It gets so confusing here sometimes.”
White Israelis fight against Palestinians while forgetting their own Holocaust and employ in their cause black Ethiopian Jews, who also made aliyah, and you feel all bad for the Palestinians until you realize that they themselves have turned and stepped on the next person down on the totempole because he’s black. And, face it, it’s almost always the black person. It doesn’t make sense and drives you to madness, but so it is. Real life isn’t black and white (in every sense of the phrase) and this is what I was trying to tell American jerks who so badly want to tie Obama to Osama until the Arab jerks, in a twist of grotesque irony and a manner that would make the KKK proud, “disowned” Obama.
No, we’re probably not all going to get along and sing “Cumbaya” together some day, but we have a long way to go in accepting the black race as very present and very human, much less as equal to the economically and dermatologically fair-skinned. I think that we have it in us to get to a place in which there is no fear that an American president of color will be assassinated and absolutely no fear that you will throttle the next person you hear who states, even in tasteless jest, that a black man who runs for president is selfish because he has automatically put himself and his family in harm’s way. Yet, you can’t let indignity like that stop you. Obama keeps walking. Black people keep walking. We all keep walking towards Zion, Shangri-La, New New Orleans, the west or wherever that lofty paradise is, on roads carved by our ancestors and a few in the making. They are long and hard for most, soft and easy for those in air-conditioned cars and better castes (and money is useful in inducing temporary color-blindness), but the journey continues. It has to.
Towards the end of Searching For Zion, Emily Raboteau speaks with Dany Admasu who walked to Israel from Ethiopia because it was the dream of generations before him to achieve the promised land. Though Admasu now lives in Jerusalem, he still hasn’t quite reached:
“Imagine you are walking. You walk from Ethiopia to Sudan. It takes two months. The weak ones didn’t make it this far. You made it, but you have to stop walking because you ran out of food and water. You are so thirsty you would gladly drink your own urine, only you are too dehydrated to urinate. You live in a refugee camp, and it is hell. Sometimes the Red Cross brings medicine, but forty to sixty people die there every day from starvation and snakebites. Israel finally hears about you, but they don’t think you’re a Jew because you’re black. You yourself didn’t know there were white Jews. You have never seen a white person before.”
We keep walking. On the ground and in our hearts, hoping for increasingly complete and decreasingly confusing lives for our children. Where else do we have to go but somewhere that isn’t here?
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Related Reading: Emily Raboteau | Mulattobama
Maitri, this writing of yours is just incredible. I am in complete awe. I can’t even wax eloquently, much as I’d like to.