Sita's Movement: A Personal Janaki Narrative

I am in graduate school, and I'm feelin very pensive about culture. 


Where did my cultural practices come from and how do I sustain them?  Which parts of the culture I inherited do I allow to live and breath within me and which parts do I shove down, suppress?  And how can my hybrid cultural experience, as a Desi [local, indigenous] woman who was bornraised in the Midwest and educated in California, be validated by my cultural inheritance?


When I started working on Janaki, I started dreaming of Sita.  No joke.  Her image would come to me in so many forms-- women walking, women dancing, women with long hair and women who had none because they offered it in pooja.  Sita had a face that I couldn't quite see and hair that I couldn't quite smell.  But I felt her with me.  I was sure that she was holding my head, a soft cradle.  That she was sitting next to me as I journeyed into and imagined the unknown.  She was my mother and grandmother and father telling me stories of her as I fell asleep, each providing more color and contradictions to her existence.  She is my sister, holding the memories of our loved ones and stories of our elders, offering me her stories when my memory is not big enough.  She is my grandmother finding ways of preserving Telegu cooking traditions with Midwestern grocery store resources in the 60s.  She is my mother supporting me encouraging me to explore the land I live though she wasn't allowed.  


Sita is the breath of our community that allows us to care for each other, and nourish ourselves with love in the form of loud voices, heartfelt song, big dancing and small motions.  She was a bridge-builder truth seeker, honoring the relationship of each person that entered her life, regardless of what they might or might not reciprocate.  Sita is love.


I began drawing her.  Dancing her.  Shaping parts of myself into her.  Weaving my tales into her spirit.  And her spirit into my choices.


Sita became part of my movement.  The way I walk intentionally from heel to toe, conscious that each muscle plays its role in preventing me from falling.  The way I write, at once giddy and solemn, between always between two worlds.  The way I am present for my family.


Because Sita had a family too, a family that also was full of life and sharing.  We gain from sharing our lives with her, as much if not more than we gain from her story, their story. There are as many versions of Ramayanas as there are people who know the name.  Ram as king, Ram as warrior. Ram as the great president leading the nation to war, a decision made from respected knowledge passed down from forefathers.  Ram as the software CEO needing to make tough decisions in unfamiliar international contexts.  My father and my grandfather, pioneers to a new land empowered by a new and old knowledge. Immigrants to America.  My father's father and greatuncles, migrants, nomads, traveling from Bangladesh to India.  Each family member came one at a time across a contentious border, to a home waiting in the distance.  Searching for home.  Hindus searching for new existences retaining values and knowledge from before. But also carrying loads.  Holding space so that we might be allowed to live, allowed to be comforted, allowed to move on.


Brothers, sisters, friends.  Mothers, many many mothers.  Sharing stake in the future our future. 


What keeps cultural narratives alive is ourselves and our lives. Hinduism has continued to exist in so many contexts, languages, cultural frameworks, rounds of colonization.  The paths to salvation are multiple, as are the visions of God.  Hinduism honors God in our day-to-day life practice, in our grand enlightenments, in our deep meditations, and in our loving devotion. It is this multiplicity that allows Hindus to practice the religion deeply.  We can bring ourselves, as we are, and allow ourselves to sit with God in our lives.


A paradox has emerged to me recently-- We are constantly negotiating between reaching for something comfortable so we may survive and identifying the real experience of our existence so we may grow.  Janaki embodies that process that we all experience, and there is God found in staying true to that process.  There is Goddess found.  And this is Sita's Movement.


Love.

process with me now

I want to shout out some amazing artists I've been working with...listening to Sounds So Different by Micropixie. Lookout for her upcoming music video for Sounds So Different (I'll be choreographing the movement!) 


Here's a lil taste of a track from her upcoming new album:

That's Micropixie...digging this video.

I've been thinking a lot about the types of visions of success that I want to have and hold. These past months, about 4 since my first post, I can feel my conscious commitment to making community around my creative processnotproducts and realtime reallive politics sort of happen in ways.  But I'm SURPRISED with how many conversations I have in creative communities about PROCESS versus PRODUCTION. What's inside of me versus what's expected. A lot of it comes down to how we understand art-- for me the art is less in the final product and more in the maneuvering relationing mobility of the process. It's about knowing and growing myself mybody mymind myspirit (and hopefully learning aboutfrom other folks).  


To me, accountability in collaborative arts but also really collaboration in general means a commitment to witnessing and presence. Hearing and listening for real. Valuing each other and making process personally meaningful.  Entering a process and actively working to be open to the potentials that the process could bring about.  Great art doesn't come from the most demanding rehearsal schedules or striving for the highest perfection.  What the fuck is perfection in anything that's realtime reallive reallife.  Great art needs to be real.  It needs to be rooted in what we already know is real.


We have knowledge. Art at it's height is a 
validation legitimization a raucous demonstration 
of coming together around what we already know is inside of us.
Art uses what we know to deepen and widen how our knowledge lets us livebreathgrowlearnlove.

"For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, "Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness" and of impotence.  

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep." (Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lourde)

Art is the real relationships we can leave with and sustain, the relationships we can deepen and strengthen, be it with each other, with ourselves, with our pastpresentfuture family members, with the worldsocietyworld.


Art is active, breathing.  Dance, music, theater, poetry, any sort of expressive form, is not a luxury, it's a vital organ in how we exist, how we relate, how we can be positive people for each other.

"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.[...]" (Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lourde)

Art is found in discussion, in thought, in day-to-day movement and sounds, in simultaneously securing and opening our existance through the relationships we foster and value.


Art is a great youth program, motherhood, being a present sister, open listening, maneuvering the world in love.


Maybe if we think ourselves as artist-builders, we can open the way in which we live. Build where we navigate, create where we go. Love when we doubt. Actively choose to replace doubt with love.

"The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that the action in the now is also always necessary. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?"  (Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lourde)

Audre Lourde's use of "women" is not to alienate the men-folks among us, but rather to question what type of knowledge is really valued.  What ways of being are necessary for our survival and how can we stop just surviving and move on to our freedom.  

Pariah Movie Trailer 

My academic/life research revolves around how our emotions are sources of liberatory knowledge, and how arts provide open frameworks for expression.  It's a political act, expressive freedom.  Even when we don't acknowledge our creations as political, they are by virtue of shaping something around us creating a vision inside of us letting other people  ourselves know about our existence.


Yeaaa here's to 
writing
playing
facilitating
opening
singing
shouting
drawing
fashioning
walking
forming
allowing
dancing
moving
wearing
celebratingexpressing
our own existanceknowledgeselves.


LOVE

how we are existing

NOTE: I've been meaning to post this for a while, but you know what?  A combination of the lil hater and being BUSY with new projects means I've pulled away from blogging and been embracing real people intereactions


Not that yall aren't real.  But it's nice to talk and be talked back to sometimes...


This one's from 4/13.  Hope you enjoy.


Love


--

How we are existing.

In our worldly context where production is not only the end product, but language of efficiency production dominates the process itself- the making, the vision, the generative process—I find my mind body cognition trapped.  Stressed.  Migraines and sleeplessness.  Too busy and too little actually getting shit done.  Or the alternative.  Disengagement.  Borderline depressed.  On the couch/bed watchingnotthinkingorfeeling. 

IN RESISTANCE of this shit.

-         Have a space to envision. Have a vision of ourselves that extends and pours beyond our bodies our immediate and material existence.  And we can give that to each other by asking, by not giving up, by fighting for real and deep relationships, out of all our relationships.  With guidesteachersmentorsfamily that helps us do this. 

-         Recognize that as humans, we are susceptible.  A recent Time article talked about the ways in which the workplace empowers male expressions of emotions while deeming female expressions as signs of instability.  While men often find emotional experiences at work cathartic, women find them disorienting.  When men get angry, it communicates caring, investment, passion, and a drive for perfection.  When women get angry, it communicates weakness of character, instability, an inability to work well with others.  When men cry, they experience a release.  Tears release toxins and tell our body that it’s ok to start over.  When women cry, the physiological benefits of crying are counteracted by social anxieties—'fuck, now I’m that bitch that’s crying because she can’t handle it.  Fuck, now I’m that bitch that can’t control her emotions for better or worse.  Fuck, now I may or may not lose my job because people around me are unable to process my tears and I am unable to process my tears because I have always learned that they’re a sign of weakness.  Fuck these tears, next time I'll hold it in, trap it, imprison it in my stomach before it's released.'  But imprisonment alters the thing you're trapping.  It's how stress translates to sadnessdispairhelplessnessdepression.  We needa watch for it.

-         Recognize that as women of color, we are susceptible to stresses around us.  Institutions in this are not structured around our cultural knowledge or physical needs.  I find that I put more pressure on myself to take on the pain, suffering, well-being of those around me.  All the time, cuz who else canorwill.  But it’s not a burden, as in, this doesn’t make me a better person.  Fuck that.  If one more person tells me it’s good of me to take on more maintenance of my family, I will scream.  And that will feel good.  It’s not that I’m a better person for caring.  It’s just that I am a person, and I cannot separate the way I live my life from the way I care for people I love.  And I have love for humanity, but I also recognize that my family and my community have fewer social resources.  We have fewer ways of knowing how to shape our social and personal lives because we have not established a history of doing so in the United States.  We were brought here to fulfill a labor need, and people who could come here to succeed did so by walking into the arms of upper middle class economic privileged.  However, we have left ties to other ways of knowingbeingpracticing back home, wherever that may be, and been taught to embrace ways of knowing that help us according to the power structures in the western world- structures that make us money and upward social gains, but little horizontal beingthereforyou support.  In the process of assimilation, we have walked away from social knowledge as a community, devaluing the social scientists and artists among us.  Those are fields for extra-curriculers to help us get into medical school or Google.  And now?  Our families have a hard time navigating when one of our own does not can not or will not conform to the existing narrative.  We often don’t have the social resources for it. 

We need doctors with social resources, the ability to look deep and counsel.  We need engineers that are politically engaged, able to not just design computer chips but a just society.  We need Business people that are willing to work for more than just money and also less money.  Because the reality is that money is a vital part of surviving in our context, but not the all-encompassing only thing.  We need to make art that speaks to our experiences and our cousins' experiences and our grandparents' experiences instead of consuming Outsourced. Outsourced has been cancelled, even though it was getting good ratings.  Who can't relate to the white dude tryna make an 'incomprehensible' India (with all its colors and spices) into a frat party? #onthatwhitetip


We need desi folks that know how to love and care for each other as a larger community in deep non-judging ways.  Love rooted in each other, caring for each other.  Holding each other as our own.  Cuz I know that instinct is in me.  We just need to foster it in each other.


LOVEloveLOVE

can i get a window seat

In effort to "beat the little hater," I'm going to up the frequency.  Yes, yes I am.  I'm going to deal with my writing joys and insecurities through this medium and pray that I'm being honest with myself through the whole process.


Speaking of being honest with yourself...

They who play it safe are quick to assassinate when they don't understand. They move in packs, ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another. They feel most comfortable in groups. Less guilt to swallow. They are us, this is what we have become.  Afraid to respect the individual.  A single person within a circumstance can move one to change.  To love herself.  To evolve.

And I ask again, how do we create community that is synonymous with our own individual transformation? I think this means being able to understand to feel to hold people as if they were yourself.  And hold yourself as a loved one. Extending love in action, but real action that builds deep I'm-there-for-you-and-we-can-kick-it relationships for a larger community.


You know, I was catcalled on my walk home from work today.  It happens.  Usually not on the days I look good or even feel good, but it happens cuz of my *ahem* exotic brownbody walkin around. Excuse me, are you Indian? And I walk by myself cuz I got places to be. Hey pretty, I see your phones out, my number is...  And I was thinkin, in part thanks to my collective sisters, is it better to be seen or not seen by men.  Because I DO remember hecka times wandering around my pretty-white college campus and thinking damn. I'm not that cute i'm not that fit i'm not attractive i'm not right. And I know it's cuz motherfuckers don't know how to take me--often regardless of gender. Only the brave ones try, and only the real ones succeed. And it's crazy being darkish-skinned-Indian, and having more South Indian Not Aryan features, and ACTUALLY KNOWING my beauty.  Just like I know honesty and love.  Cuz I see, in the spaces where my brownbeauty is read as a privileged network of import professionals and outsourced cousins, as in spaces where i'm privileged by South Asian immigration to the U.S. as a professional labor need, I'm seen as prettybeautiful aesthetics. In spaces I'm read as brown, jus brownakanotwhite, I'm invisiblesilenced and def not that cute. 


Ya. I've learned to walk with people who see me in nuanced ways.  And I've learned to fight for relationships that do.  And fight to expanddeepenyelltalkkeeptalkingandfightfor relationships that don't.  Cuz that's faith in love.  And you know.  Be able to hold the gaze of forgotten folks. Cuz folks' real lives and community networks are being forgotten, definitely us as a country. Thanks to Bruja for postin this vid:

[Oprah and other recognizable black folks] have many cousins who deserve a fair break, a fair deal...

actively walkin

I’m trying to keep a Journal

And hope that these

Thoughts

Experiences

People

Surroundings

Turn into something whole

And help me create

(re)create my

Thoughts

Experiences

People

Surroundings

My feet get cold on the

Sweating tiles

As I wander around

My other other

Original

Home

My souls feel cool against me shorts

And I think with my feet

I trust them

As I find myself part of

The dragon que vive

Y no sabia en cual manera

Voy

Precious people

Dirty feet

I relax in my brown self

Knowing that I am

And here I am more

I relax in my brown self

Walk forward firm footed

And grounded

Waiting for—no-

Searching for—no-

Actively loving

For more and now

Feeling the solid earth under the dirt

And I walk with

And to

Love.

LOVE BROWN FROMnTO BROWN LOVE

creative people of the world UNITE!

Ok, so this is a common misconception about artists and cultural workers and people who generally can and SHOULD put their voice out there-- that we gotta be PRODUCING all the fuckin time.  But you know what? There's not that much support out there, as in OFFICIAL support, for the artistic shit we're trying to do.  Especially for some of us and some of our communities.  I'm sorry, but when did EXPRESSION as in HUMAN EXPRESSION become private property? 


New one I'm workin out...


PRODUCTION spread the word get heard 
don't know what I'm saying who gives a fuck 
as long as the hits on my site are growing and 
showing that my voice is more valuable than yours.

PRODUCTION cuz resources are limited 
and I need other people to appreciate appreciate 
if I'm supposed to keep making the hate go away.

PRODUCTION as in we need to 
PRODUCE in order to create, 
PRODUCE in order to self validate
PRODUCE in order to show the world 
that we actually exist but damn
sometimes I can't even 
pass a bowel movement
take a piss
cuz the STRESS 
is too intense.

So I'm just sayin, 
I CANNOT work under the pressure to be a PRODUCER 
cuz I'm a cultural WORKER.
cuz product oriented culture
makes me tired makes me disconnected 
from my sisters from myself
Less accountable and less real
unable to work unable to deal
so give me a present and sustainable
Process. 
I'm looking for process.


~~~


Really feeling homeboy ill doctrine on this one...







LOVE AND CREATION!!

I'm mad/ and help me put the words back/ baby got back/ throwback

There is so much to say this time, and I have so few words. 

I wanted this to be a post about youth censorship, a trend towards policing the bodies and sexualities and expression.  The inspiration? The discovery that if you Google Image Search "high school grinding," you find the most precious grind line of some homies from my graduating high school class. This is the image right before kim kardashian grinding into reggie bush, 
with khloe watching in the background... good ol' fashioned ass in crotch rhythmic rubbing.  No exchange of fluids, just good energy (and if I remember, baby got back was the song of choice (and if there was some post-event exchange of fluids, our sexual health awareness group had that safe-sex shit on LOCK(with the support of Planned Parenthood()))). 

I'm not pictured, I think I'm in the front or something...

The context for this picture? 2006 was the year that grinding at school dances was banned by our school administration-- this is, mind you, a laboratory school of 300 high-achieving students in a liberal environment. Aka, we weren't used to being censored.
In one of our last dances, we protested through this massive grind line. 


can't stop won't stop....
maybe not exactly a revolution but definitely some community generated resistance, dig it. 

I think I want to connect the experiences of youth in suburban areas in regards to sexual policing through anti-grinding policies, and the deep and institutionally racist struggle experienced by youth (of color) in low-income communities.  Policing the movement and legitimized conduct of youth bodies. Movement and conduct of youth are bound by definitions of white expression, limiting what our youth can be, do, feel, communicate. Gang injunctions and lovely gang database lists where youth are registered as criminals for associating or being associated with "anything gang related" in the increasingly limited public spaces. Privatized public spaces that do more work to assign those who spend time there youth of color, homeless folks, vulnerable people looking for a place to kick it when no space is available able for them to own #capitalismisabitch as deviant, criminal, OBVIOUSLY up to no good.  Did you know that in LA, benches are designed to be dangerous to sleep on rest on relax on evenmuthafuckin sit on?  Studies show this type of database policing does less to actually protect victims of violence in communities, and more to funnel youth of color into a saturated prison system. I mean, if they can't even STAND like us, or DRESS like us, or DRAW like us, or DANCE like us, why should they be in OUR steets/hallways/schoolsystem/office? #sarcasticshit. This all endorses a culture where interaction with youth is based on reactionary negative reprimanding rather than developing genuine relationships of education and mentorship. Youth to GROW. not behave. 

Spaces where youth can simply be, just be, as in just EXIST are monitored, public spaces are deemed unsafe, community centers are shutting down, funding for accessible health centers is halted. DAMN. Youth don't need to be told not to grind. They need their reproductive resources, they need schools with RESOURCES, they need places to go when they can recognize unhealthiness in their lives.  They need the opportunity to recognize unhealthiness in their lives. And celebrate the health.

Ending wit another of my poems. herrrrr it goes.

Small Talk

This always happens

When you come at me like

“Where you from, can I have your number?”

Or “Hey girl, is that your real hair?”

Or “mami, eres muy guapa queee”

Or “like you’re cute for an Indian girl”

Expecting me to participate in a discussion to see

How dumb-pretty I can be

And when I release my views

My smart-ugly comes on through

Smart-ugly, Combahee Collective

As in when I sound smart,

I am ugly

So

I present an impassive self-assertion

Unparticipating in your

Black stares empty compliments cuz fool

I can tell you only know my name

When I’m deemed

Sexually desirable

I reject—

Spitting lines

Of what’s on my mind

What’s in my heart cuz see

I never been to good at small talk

never understood that small talk

Should reduce the limits of my mind

To the limits of your sex drive

And I

reject—

Cuz they say that

Polite conversation doesn’t include

Politics, money or religions

So like

Any combination of the decisions

That even seem worth talking about to me

Reason to waste any word-driven energy

Like did you know

Knowledge is constructed by

The precious representations we project

And consume

And that

I wanna empower my voice and the voices

Of those whom we

Relegate to

Zoos, tombs and rooms in

Warehouse prisons and warehouse schools

Actively deactivating the

Critical minds of our youth

Visibly hiding the

Tangible experiences of our people

Historically removing from the agenda

human rights of our communities.

And so when you

Try to get at me like the

Dumb-pretty girl you see me to be

I look you with my

“Exotic” lashes,

Deep dark eyes

And raise my fist and organize

Incorporating my

Critical analysis

Into our mental paralysis

Interventions of intersections of

Gender and race, sexuality and class

that are on my body beyond

you lookin at my ass

And we think that there’re no connections

Between our politics and our erections

Between our transit networks and our social networks

And when I spit this shit

You call me intense

You call me too much

You call me scary—

Scary

Scary?  Really.

Let me break this down for you

The shit that’s scaring me shitless

Is the depoliticization of our people

The deactivation of our country

The denial of the contradiction between

What we’re supposed to know

And what we really see and feel

So access to education, mobility

Transit and social

Are secondary

Is that intense enough for you?
And justice starts with heart

Backing up the mind

Making heard our priorities that

Serve our needs our futures

Our lives our growth

Our people ourselves

And

We need to get off on justice

And we are demanding justice

And we demand justice now

~~~

LOVE

can i get a WHAT WHAT THE F**K??

Literally. MY HEALTH CLINIC JUST CLOSED INDEFINITELY!!

I'm sorry, since when were accessible health resources an OPTION????? WHAT is going on??  My new years resolution is NO BABIES 2011 along with having a solid draft of my play and working on getting in to grad school and finding my voice in reconnecting with my familyhistory.  I'm sorry, are there people who don't REALIZE that in order for us to DO anything, our health and wellness needs to be ensured (and insured)?  That at the very least our physical HEALTH is a promise worth keeping?  Our bodies need to be supported so that we can be and live, and HOW can a clinic that serves 54,000 patients close?????  Fifty four THOUSAND. People. Of color (vast majority, I am in Oakland). My family. My partner's family. And that's just talking traditional family structures. How many people are affected in those larger social networks, most of whom are people of color? The closures occurred because of a lag in state refunding medical services, as the economy continues to yank resources from low-income communities of color.  

Seriously. This shit is tired.