Philip Seymour Hoffman at a Hudson Union Society event in September 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
May seem like a morbid headline, especially with many fans of Philip Seymour Hoffman reeling from the news of his untimely passing. The truth is, in our technologically advanced “modern” society, we don’t talk about death enough. Or the facts.
We are finite beings whose lives have a beginning and an end. None of us knows when either of these are coming. We share in common, regardless of race, creed, or status, an overriding uncertainty. But the more toys we develop (or acquire) the more this singular bond fades — that is until the notice of an illness or tragedy brings our mortality back, full force, with enough weight to crush us.
We resist the decay of our bodies, in particular as women, but also men, through surgeries, creams, and lotions, eliding the very wrinkles and sags that signal our common end.
I was having dinner with a friend, almost ten years younger than me. She, and many of my single friends, look at women like me with envy. I am happily married, have two boys, enjoy my work.
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said.
“There are no guarantees,” I answered.
The truth is, we jump into the pursuit of happiness as though once found, joy will sustain us to the end of our lives. As anyone who has ever been married (or fallen in love) can tell you, the effect wears off. Euphoria becomes mundane; you’re at the sink, brushing your teeth, deciding who gets to sleep in and who’s day it is for nursery drop off.
“He could die,” I told her. “And then what? I start the romance circuit all over again.”
I have so many friends, longing to find a partner. I remember that feeling, the worry of never finding “the one.” I also know, now that I “have” him, he’s not mine to keep. I share this perspective with them, gently, to curb their mounting self-judgment of unworthiness at still being single.
Often I get a sidewise look in reply. But I persist. The seldom acknowledged truth is, my husband, my children, my parents, or even you dear reader, could be taken at any time.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The worst is when, like with Mr. Hoffman, Heath Ledger, my young friend Claire, or high school classmate Raul, we are left behind in the wake of someone’s decision to end his/her life. Suicide is a rude interrupter of the pedantic notes of life, shaking the foundations of our perspective, of the grocery list, the tires that need changing, the dishes waiting to be washed.
Let’s abate this quiet despair by talking. To loved ones, to strangers, to students, or friends. In the sharing of our experiences, perhaps we can all be a little less lonely. And such a connection may be the first sign of true love. Not the over hyped eros that is the focus of the commercially created frenzy around Valentine’s day. But the steady, true phileo, or brotherly love.
Who can you reach out today to lend an ear? If you yourself are in need of one, you’ll find me here.
The third Monday in January may mean a ski holiday for those grew up in the United States in the 80’s. For 28 years, this has been the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the long weekend commemorating his birth, and his fight, as a private citizen, for civil rights for great grandchildren of African descendents in America. He is more than a soundbite and a day off, however, even to those of us who were not on his mind when he was marching or sitting in jail.
The history of race relations in America has been dominated by a black/white dichotomy that often ignores the multi-hues that make up the famed “melting pot.” I’m not saying that the history of slavery, plantations and an agrarian Southern economy is not important. Nor that the resurgence of Hollywood interest in examining this dark period, from Django Unchained to 12 Years a Slave, isn’t artistically and thematically significant.
I am saying that to grow up in-between black and white in America, brown in my case, meant knowing your place was next to impossible. Many of us could use professional support in unpacking the cultural support we grow up in.
I remember moving to Palo Alto, California before it was the home of Facebook or Google. A few weeks into my new school, the teacher sent the three black kids and the one brown (me) to the library to meet with a reporter to talk about the importance of MLK Jr. and the relatively new holiday. This was circa 1987/88.
I was terrified.
All the way down the hallway to the library, I racked my brain about this man I knew nothing about. I had never heard of him before.
The other kids, if they had, said nothing to me, the new girl, about anything.
We were posed around a children’s book, me standing at the shoulder of a girl, who was holding two pages open, one of them with a black and white photo of a man with a wide forehead and regal smile. I scanned the page, desperate for clues.
The caption said something like Dr. King went to jail several times for his beliefs. The reporter asked me later what I thought of MKL Jr.
I dutifully repeated the only semi-fact I had at hand.
“He went to jail for what he believed in.”
I wished there had been more print on the page, or I had a few seconds more to flip through that book and read up on this man everyone was sure I knew a lot about.
The reporter was disappointed that I didn’t have more to say. He (she? A 9 year old’s memories are not that reliable) moved on to someone else.
But the spark had started: I knew I was different from other people. And they were different from me a hereto unexamined fact. What I thought up until then was unclear. Had I thought the whole world was Indian? I knew people looked different than my family; my teacher didn’t dress like my mother after all. I had led an unexamined life, despite moving from India to Canada at a young age.
I went around school, asking classmates, what made this unknown category of black.
“They can’t have red hair,” someone said. The wisdom of 9 year olds only left me with more questions.
Like Harriet the Spy, one of my childhood heroines, I wrote that and a myriad of other semi-facts down.
I wrote it down, despite knowing that with my South Asian man, red was a color I couldn’t aspire to either. The world was no longer as I knew it.
As I grew older, and moved across America, from California to Texas, to Florida, and then North Carolina, part of a family of nomadic academics, my on-the-spot racial education continued. And what I was learning was even more conflicted.
Being Indian, I was part of the “Model Minority” as an Asian. Our type of immigrants were white collar professionals, assimilated into American culture by speaking English, owning homes, sending children to good schools.
My friends in high school and college, whose parents wouldn’t speak to them if they dated a black person, would welcome me into their homes, hold my hand at dinner, and smile hellos to my parents.
“But I don’t think of you as black,” they would say if I mentioned how uncomfortable I felt about being brown in the South.
“But I’m not white,” I wanted so desperately to say. During a classroom enrichment activity, designed to highlight class privilege, I stepped back with all the black kids, even though my parents had taken me to museums. I couldn’t fathom stepping forward and being ahead, in line with all the white kids.
Instead, I wore lots of (hot pink) lipstick to hide my brown lips, complied when a friend asked to see my gums (he wanted to see if they were the same color as his), and fretted I was not as attractive as my white girl friends*, doomed to spend the rest of my life alone. White men, I knew, would not find me attractive. And living in central Florida, then the capital of North Carolina, my future stretched long and lonely.
Which brings me to the recent media storm around women of color appearing on high profile magazines.
In their rush to democratize the notoriously Caucasian magazine industry, and hopefully open up notions of beauty, the editors of women’s magazines are making obvious blunders in whitewashing the very women they’re hoping to honor. There’s Mindy Kaling and Elle debacle, where the gorgeous, regular woman size 8 Mindy was not only cropped, instead of full length, she is the only cover to appear in black and white. Or the speculations that the luminous 12 Years a Slave actress, the rising star, Lupita Nyong’o’s skin had been lightened in a Vanity Fair spread; whether or not it was the lighting or Photoshop, the effect is the same. Lighter, the beauty industry keeps telling us, is more beautiful.
All of which was brought to my mobile device when I cropped out my own toes in an Instagram photo. That’s right; they were too dark for me to think they were lovely. I did the same with my fingers holding the baby (whose face is very white, like his East Asian father’s).
You’ve been reading this blog for a while you know I am an otherwise confident, educated, credentialed published author, mother of two, wife of seven years. And yet when I see my skin, the darker on my hands than my face, I cringe.
Different people have different tributes to Dr. King Jr. For me, as a brown person growing up in America, by starting the process of living black and free, he and all the other fighters in the Civil Rights movement made Gandhi a part of everyday American parlance. A fact I will be forever grateful for as an Indian American adult. Gandhi’s own political consciousness was stirred in South Africa, when he saw the treatment of blacks and browns under white supremacy.
Both demonstrated that people with dark skin can and should occupy public spaces – both literally and figuratively – like anyone else.
A black president, the first Indian American Miss USA (she’s darker than the average almost white Bollywood star), and I’m still a teenage girl, worried my fingers are too dark to be attractive.
From this MLK JR day forward, I vow not to hide my hands or feet from Instagram or anywhere else. A small step to be sure, but if we can resist the assertion of governments to own our bodies, how much more insidious is the beauty industry, in cahoots with the media, gaining our permission, voluntarily, towards self-hatred?
Tupac Shukur immortalized the saying, “the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”
Khalifa International Stadium (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When I moved to Qatar in 2005 many thought I was headed to Turkey. I’m not sure why since they don’t even share one letter in common.
Perhaps because Turkey was the most exotic place my friends in the United States had heard of.
In the months after I relocated, my friends would email and ask me how I was doing in Dubai. Again, the splashy Emirate is the one most familiar to those who grasp for a fact about the Arabian Gulf — other than, of course, Saudi Arabia.
In the years since then, major donations to Hurricane Katrina victims, a global financial crisis, hikes in the price of crude oil and the award of the world’s largest sporting event, the World Cup, for 2022 to Qatar, more people know where we live.
The small emirate has muscled its way into global politics and international sports; and now, as all politicians find out sooner or later, the thorn in the rose accompanying great ambition is equally great scrutiny. The media maelstrom over “workers” constructing the stadiums for 2022 has been building for months. The reactions to these news reports are even more telling that Qatar has a deeper problem than social change: the emirate is engaged in rhetoric entrenched in the vestiges of imperialism, or cultural superiority.
Yes, Qatar has a long way to go in supporting the rule of law – particularly the enforcement of existing statutes – and enforce the protection of the rights of guest workers. The laws are in place but notorious abuses by private companies lead to unpaid workman’s compensation claims, unpaid wages, unsanitary living conditions, and the worst accusation, human trafficking. And yes, it’s important to be conscientious spectators.
I’m not defending these violations. In fact, during my time here, I have tried to aid people who have been disadvantaged by the kafalah or sponsorship system. The sponsor has all the power; the spaces to negotiate against someone who wants you out – most likely because they don’t want you to tell others how terrible they are – are miniscule if not non-existent. Yet we still try, knowing that we have to do the good we can. Owning the right to someone’s future is a power – the right to say whether or not someone can stay and work for someone other than you – that few of us are familiar with in the international community. A power we can’t imagine. A power we can’t have as expats, reserved only for nationals. Perhaps this makes us even angrier.
What I find as troubling as the downsides of having a bad kafeel, or sponsor, however, is the glee which greets the reports of guest worker abuse. Whether journalists sweeping in broad stroke regurgitated content about “worker” misery, or commentators on these articles, a strident chord points the finger saying, “See! I told you they were barbarians! Those rich Arabs!” The contrast of the Qatari driving a luxury car and paying only $200 a month to a housemaid is no different to my mind than the average American who picks up a Latino handyman at the gas station for household repairs, giving him cash and a McDonald’s meal at the end of the day.
Are we so different? In scale perhaps. Maybe proximity. Or even more significantly, opportunity.
A society that has problems is human. Yes, the conditions of the Nepalese workers, as many as 85 who died working in Doha’s summer temperatures, is inhuman. Nuanced reporting such as the Guardian’s piece is what we all need – expat, outsider or national – to understand the depth of the problem. To put faces and names to the “workers” who are quickly become a conversational item in a dialogue that is as much about how we talk about social change as the ethics behind a set of stadiums.
Villianizing an entire nation, and victimizing a population, casts oppositional roles, roles which are difficult to reform, and even more difficult to have any conversational about at all.
If we are interested in change, if we do want better conditions, then we have to give people back the dignity of individuality, on all sides.
We know these companies rely on national informants, people who live in Nepal, India, or the sending countries, who are profiting from the bait and contract switch as much as the private companies cutting corners. They are pieces of a global puzzle that has built this nation building machine powering the Arabian Gulf. A machine that has been decades in the assembling; starting with the talent to supply the fuel we use when we drive vehicles around the western hemisphere.
Where was the outcry then, as the Gulf states quietly built the stockpiles of cash many now envy them for? Is this unlike equipping the Taliban to overthrow the Soviets and then being surprised when they overthrow their masters?
If we care for the “worker” then we will not come from a place of judgment on systems that are in the process of changing. A social and economic change for Qatar akin to the shifting of technoic plates; a reordering of the fabric of society.
In the meantime, what was the name of the man who died when a wall fell over on him building our facility? How we find out his name, his family, we try to help get the body home?
If we are upset about the maid who is working 20 hours a day, we try to get her a new boss, use our authority to convince the sponsor to transfer her.
Yes, it takes time. It will involve each of us who are willing, regardless of our nationality. This is the start of all great reform; the level of the individual, well below what the rule of law can reform, the level of human conviction. Otherwise all we have is talk.
Of course, pointing the finger takes only a few seconds.
The rhetoric building around 2022, pushes us back into sides, back into a binary opposition of the ‘moral’ West and the ‘amoral’ rest or in this case rich, abusive Arabs.
From littering to car seats to civil rights or marriage equality, the development of western society has happened at its own pace through the concerted efforts of passionate individuals. If we alienate those willing to work towards a more equitable future of guest workers with our blanket judgments, we risk halting that development.
