I used to will chaos into my life. It was a gift of sorts. Mother said I was born to Thunder—which is an element of chaos and liberation in my culture. I have always believed that an electric chaos ran through my blood.
“It’s a gift to be born this way,” my mother said, the first time I told her that I had a terrible dream of a large wheel spinning before me. It would not stop. “That is Thunder. This is a gift.”
She saw the world differently, and I by proxy. Her willful nature to name the world as she saw it, not how they wanted us to see it, made me believe in the power of being an indigenous woman.
There was a moment at the river with my mother long ago, when I asked her why we pray. She told me that prayer was not begging, or asking for things, but an expression of gratitude for the way things are. She looked at me, and behind her the river was not rushing. There were so many spirals in the current of the river, and many undertows.
She saw what I was staring at. “That is your power too,” she said. “The undertow can drown people.” I knew she was pointing to the chaos of what we cannot see, and that the undercurrent—the chaos and conflict beneath every surface—is necessary.
Sometimes, all I have is the power that she gave me—and the stories too. There might not be some mythological magic to me as a human being, but there is a reason I am drawn to spirals, to spinning things, to the disruptive nature of story, and to speaking out.
I am Thunder Woman, born to brutalities against me. I am Silence Breaking Woman. When I am told not to speak, by my father or anyone, there is a wielding thing turning inside of me that cannot be contained. It is a calling to be gifted with voice.
As an Indian woman, I feel a responsibility to be hard on the world, but love it as familial. I feel a responsibility to be hard on myself as well. I am both fallible and a gift. Even our perceived heroes are monstrous and imperfect sometimes. How easily Th’owxeya’s story could have been different, had she made her cave a sanctuary of safety for children who needed a home. How different would the world be without mosquitoes or men like my father. In every person there is a myth, waiting. There are many reasons to survive.
WINDSOR, UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 19: Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex wave as they leave Windsor Castle after their wedding to attend an evening reception at Frogmore House, hosted by the Prince of Wales on May 19, 2018 in Windsor, England. (Photo by Steve Parsons - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
Markle majored in international relations and theatre at Northwestern University, Illinois. Besides becoming an actor, she became a feminist who worked for UN Women as an advocate for political participation and leadership. Yes, she has been praised and criticised as “outspoken”, but her style never risks being “aggressive” or “combative”, or any of the other words thrown at women who are deemed insufficiently graceful when they disagree with men. Even when she makes staunch political statements, her manner astutely — sometimes cloyingly — balances the forthright and the pleasing. She’s learned to use political maxims and assertions very effectively. As in: “It’s time to focus less on glass slippers and more on glass ceilings.” With the word “fairytale” now a ubiquitous tag line for the royal romance, this should be a useful daily mantra.
The Cinderella story refuses to dwindle into a period piece; in the last 20 years alone there have been six film remakes with white, black and Latina leads. But Markle has not been plucked from poverty or — like the heroines of such romcom adaptations as Pretty Woman and Maid in Manhattan – from the low-status toil and trouble of working-class life. Her net worth as an actor has been estimated at around $5m. An actor’s fortunes can fluctuate, especially when that actor is a woman. But so can the fortunes of a wife. If the royal marriage were to end in divorce, Markle would not have to depend on the Windsor millions nor, like many once-upon-a-time celebrities, design a skincare or jewellery line for QVC.
Lots of public health work in the U.S. focuses on the “obesity crisis” and how poverty and fatness intersect. But what stereotypes are we internalizing about poor parents and fat kids? What does it feel like to be a fat person doing this work? Harmony Cox, a fat food justice activist, tells us in her essay at Narratively.
We were discussing the neighborhood, and how we could help people here get healthier food. Creating access to healthy food is my job, but it’s also my passion. It’s how I pay my bills and find an outlet for my frustration with a society that allows the poor to suffer. I was hoping to hear some optimism. Instead I got this:
“Nobody would eat it. Everyone around here is just so… fat.”
I felt the folds of my belly pushing against the table. I felt familiar shame burn the back of my throat, bitter as a $7 coffee.
She went on, “The kids always eat fast food. It’s like nobody loves them.”
I wondered how she could know what the kids around here always eat, and what that has to do with how loved they are…
In the reality of feeding a struggling family, the food pyramid is irrelevant. Keeping us fed was a source of pride, junk food was a source of joy, and so our diets endured.
I don’t remember parents who didn’t love me. If anything, they loved me too much, and their love language came deep-fried. It may have hurt me in the long run, but that’s never been a sign that something wasn’t borne from love.
A personal essay in which Lara B. Sharp’s efforts to gather information about what happened to her in foster care and as a ward of the state turn up nothing but incorrect records.
Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova at a TimesTalk on May 14, 2018. Credit: YouTube
Live journalism serves a few different purposes. It can seek to engage an audience directly in the process of producing journalism, sometimes as a means to combatting mistrust for the profession. It can seek to break news, live, on a stage.
At a TimesTalk featuring Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and performance artist Marina Abramovic on in Midtown Manhattan on May 14, Melena Ryzik did a little of both.
Tolokonnikova spoke of a recent visit to the city jail at Rikers Island and her horror at the conditions at what she described as a penal colony in the middle of “supposedly progressive” New York. She found them, to her shock, worse that those in Putin’s jails. The pair of artists teased a potential forthcoming collaboration, perhaps stemming from a plan they have to work together on May 27. And at Abramovic’s urging, Ryzik screened two Pussy Riot videos, at least one of which was being displayed for the first time.
But the most powerful moment for me was when Tolokonnikova described what sounded like the watershed experience of her life as an activist. At age 13, she wanted to be a political journalist and write about environmental issues. She lived in a small northern town where the snow was always black due to pollution from the industrial business that the town was essentially organized around. She went to the local paper with an investigation into “who is responsible for making black snow,” and was told by the editors — who she said she’d written for before — that the story was good, but “you understand, we can’t publish it.” The company that was responsible was too powerful to challenge.
“‘You understand’ — that’s the keyword in Russia. ‘You understand,'” Tolokonnikova said.
Here is an image of a 13-year-old idealist being enlisted to participate in her own oppression. “You understand” is a phrase used to inure us to our own oppression, and make us complicit in the oppression of others. It draws us into the system that oppresses; tells us that we are already part of it; suggests that to reject it is simply to not get it. The implication is that to not understand is to somehow be lacking, to be not as smart as we would be if we understood. The young don’t understand, by their very nature. That is part of their power. They are not yet indoctrinated into the performance of the system; their powers of perception and inclination to question has not yet been eroded by years of bumping up against oppression both subtle and overt.
I thought of this when I saw the writer Quince Mountain’s description on Twitter of growing up trans. “To be trans is to grow up with a persistent and overwhelming sense of being lied to by those around you and a sense that those around you demand your wholehearted participation in that lie,” he wrote.
I'll take a stab: To be #trans is to grow up with a persistent and overwhelming sense of being lied to by those around you and a sense that those around you demand your wholehearted participation in that lie. Either they are wrong, or you are wrong. Something is definitely wrong. https://t.co/RPpY82CeuY
— Rugged Art Cowboy (@QuinceMountain) May 16, 2018
I thought of it again when reflecting on conversations with women abused by politicians. Women cajoled to participate in the continuation of their abuse, cajoled by agents of a system to preserve that system, agents who believe that the system is invaluable and the men who comprise it are, too. I thought of a line from Emma Gray’s Huffington Post essay after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was accused of intimate partner violence by four women, one of whom he was simultaneously using to build his reputation as a feminist ally: “Thus the victim would be made to participate in the invention of the alibi.”
I thought about struggles I’ve had to convince editors that a woman’s story is deserving of consideration on its own, even if she is not accompanied by other victims. I thought about people who dismiss corruption because “everyone does it,” and “that’s the way it is” or because our laws are flawed, so bad acts aren’t actually illegal. I thought about all the times I’ve heard, “you understand,” and nodded.
Then I thought about the energy I got from teaching journalism students this year, from their almost unconscious rejection of the system we’ve become conditioned to accept as “just the way it is.” And I thought about Tolokonnikova’s assertion that resistance and activism is not something that is ever finished, that we ever achieve to some conclusive end. “You’re never going to get there finally, but that’s the beauty of human life, I think… It’s an everyday struggle,” she’d said. Ryzik had helped summarize for her: “Being a citizen is a daily exercise.” Agreeing, Tolokonnikova added, “You cannot win. You cannot lose. You have to keep working on it it, you have to find new ways every day… That’s a daily job.” Likewise, I realized, resisting the power of “you understand” is a daily practice.
Near the end of the event, Abramovic took issue with a question from an audience member who apparently had read some misinformation about an upcoming performance. She used the Trumpian phrase “fake news” twice, to raucous applause from the audience and my dismay. I thought back to Tolokonnikova’s statement earlier in the discussion that “artists should develop new languages to help other people, new languages that are not mainstream languages,” and was disappointed that Abramovic would perpetuate the use of language meant to sow mistrust and discord among a polity. It seemed less like resistance and more like another form of “you understand.” I remembered the Tolokonnikova’s statement on language: “We are not alive; we are dead if we are using the language that was given to us.”
And I remembered Tolokonnikova’s anecdote this week amid now-regular calls from conservatives and liberals alike for liberals to be nicer to bigots, to be more “civil.” When people — including Julia Ioffe, who later apologized — questioned why news outlets were following around a lawyer who threatened to call immigration on two women speaking Spanish, I thought of how these calls for “civility” seem to be veiled calls for complacency, or even complicity. For silence. I heard “you understand” in these calls. You understand why it’s better to be polite, to be quiet, to be “civil.” Stop resisting. You understand.
A personal essay in which Marie Myung-Ok Lee finds herself conflicted about attending a controversial author’s reading and wonders: what does “speaking up” actually mean?
“The whole country is outraged and outspoken and you should be too
because if you’re not, then you’re not doing your part.”
— Rachel Coye, “New Year”
As a writer, a books columnist for the literary site The Millions, the co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a literary citizen with prolific and brilliant friends whose readings and performances I could probably ink every night on my calendar, let’s say I go to a lot of book signings. Some have food, some have wine. Some have people who wander in and ask irrelevant questions with disarming earnestness.
At one reading where I acted as interlocutor, the novelist I was interviewing took out a package of Swiss chocolate she’d brought with her from Geneva, and instead of putting it on the plate with the wine, handed it to me with a sly smile. I’ve been to several readings where I have been the sole member of the audience. I was asked to do a reading that would involve live exotic animals as accompaniment. I went to one on the Lower East Side, back when it was truly gritty, where the writer was accompanied — overpowered, really — by a person blowing random high notes on a flute. Each reading offers something different, delightful, educational, new.
But I’ve never been to a reading/book signing that had protesters. Especially not for a book the Cleveland Plain Dealer called a “Beautiful, eloquent, and timely” memoir authored by a young writer with a new MFA, a Fulbright, and a Whiting Award. In the era of Trump, where there is something new to protest every day (women’s rights, the EPA, the NEA, gun control, tax cuts for the rich, healthcare…), what would cause the lovely indie bookstore, Books Are Magic to send out a warning on Facebook before the event?
PUTRAJAYA, MALAYSIA - JUNE 05: An officer of Malaysia's Islamic authority uses a telescope to perform "rukyah", the sighting of the new moon of Ramadan, in Putrajaya outside Kuala Lumpur on June 5, 2016. Muslims scan the sky at dusk in the beginning of the lunar calendar's ninth month in search of the new moon to proclaim the start of Ramadan, Islam's holiest month during which observant believers fast from dawn to dusk. Muslims celebrate the end of Ramadan with the Eid al-Fitr festival. (Photo by Mohd Samsul Mohd Said/Getty Images)
For BuzzFeed Reader, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib considers how holding on to the observance of Ramadan, despite an adulthood spent veering from other aspects of his faith, has been a grounding force in a busy, thoroughly modern life.
I don’t know why Ramadan is the act of faith which has endured for me. I hardly refer to myself as a practicing Muslim these days, but I am still very invested in the rigor of Ramadan. And I suppose that might be it — the rigor is the act I still chase after. A part of this is routine — even when I stopped praying in my early twenties, I found myself still adhering to the commemoration of the holy month. But a part of it, I imagine, is like the home-run hitter who comes to the plate with the bases loaded and his team down by four, swinging for the fences and trying to get it all back at once.
I know the ways in which I fail in the face of my beliefs, and yet I wish to consider myself forgiven once each year, when I wake up early to pray and have a small meal with the sun breaking over the horizon. When I abstain from food and drink and still take a long run. I suppose it has never stopped being a performance, but when I engage in Ramadan now, I feel closer to my faith than I did before. I am performing it for no one but myself, in most instances. I am often traveling, or secluded during the month. My non-Muslim friends and peers rarely know I’m fasting, or often forget. To go about it in solitude is my preferred mode now, when nothing else matters but the monthlong journey back to some emotional center I’ve thought myself to be lacking. When the month ends, I don’t return to a dedicated spiritual practice, and my life resumes as it normally does all other 11 months of the year. But for as many days as it takes the crescent moon to unsheathe itself, I remember all of the old prayers I skipped. I remind myself how to talk to a holy entity. I don’t eat, sure, but the not eating has become the easy part, particularly as I’ve aged. To find the humility to imagine yourself as small in the face of something larger than you is the hard part, and for me, that has little to do with not eating, and more to do with the knowing that you could eat, at any time. That you have the ability and privilege to fill yourself, and you still choose not to. I do this in the name of a faith that I am uncertain of, and haven’t always felt at home in, and that makes the act both more complicated and more fulfilling.
This excellent ongoing series on the Teen Vogue website features a mix of essays and reporting on non-politicians stepping up and getting involved in government to make a difference.
There is a story. A shepherd boy, 13 or so, has a dozen brothers. His family lives in a small village near a large mountain. One day the boy is gone — with his flock, or to complete a chore, or perhaps even to find a safer place for the family to stay. He returns and finds everyone in the village dead. His brothers are all decapitated, and his father, too. His mother raped by attackers and dead by suicide. Over many years, he makes his way, somehow, halfway across the earth, where he marries a woman from a country near his homeland. They have three sons, none of whom marry. Until one of them does, at the age of 41, to a woman who is 38. They have two daughters, one of whom tells this story to her children for as long as they can remember.
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