Some people do not leave home. I will not forget reading about the Indian farmer who committed suicide at a rally opposing a government’s land acquisition bill a few months ago. He left a note, something about wanting to feed his two children. That he was driven out of home after his crops were destroyed, and please tell me how to go home? What is the difference between a migrant and a refugee when you add up the little numbers to do the arithmetic that turns home into a desert and suffocates your family slowly with a poisonous gas called “globalization”?...
I live in a country-that-thinks-of-itself-as-a-world where every action, every simple purchase, every step towards your own livelihood is predicated on someone else’s death. I remember how one of the things I used to love so much about this city was its subways. The ability to move freely is a luxury, a privilege in this world that is getting “smaller” by imposing claustrophobia on those who don’t represent capital and its interests. The cab drivers here migrate precariously across oceans to drive people around, serving mobility to the highly mobile wealthy-class in this dense concrete grid. They shuttle around people who make business trips to their homelands regularly, but they are barred from transporting their own bodies back home by stern immigration policies that follow rule #1 of globalization - only money travels boundlessly.
“I grew up in Jamaica, Queens with some of the bravest girls to walk this planet. The girls I knew were quietly fierce and pioneers of the urban landscape. Most lived in heavily-populated West Indian communities in Queens (South Ozone, Jamaica and Richmond Hill), and self-identified as Trinidadian, Guyanese and on occasion, East Indian...Biggie Smalls, Wu-Tang Clan, Beverly Hills 90210, and Brad Pitt formed the backdrop of my '90s life. However, my experience as an immigrant teenage girl from Queens, NY, was very different from life portrayed in popular media. I didn’t live in a nice house or hang out at the mall with my friends or have a unique talent that I could count on. Instead, I rolled with a crew of girls who merged mainstream American culture with the urban immigrant lifestyle in which we were embedded. ”
Perhaps what is most missing during historic cataclysms and exile is not the past and the homeland exactly, but rather this potential space of cultural experience that one has shared with one's friends and compatriots that is based neither on nation nor religion but on elective affinities
Svetlana Boym, Reflective Nostalgia from Futures of Nostalgia
Whether its a diary, self-addressed letter penned to an older self, or a poem like this, there is something duly haunting about reading a young woman’s communication with herself, especially her younger self. Or watching her become herself, grapple with that becoming. This poem is the perfect example of that. Read the whole thing if you can, after the break.
Some of the conditions that historically shaped the lives of “coolie women” endure, and not only in the Caribbean. Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen argued in 2013 that regions in India (and elsewhere) with shortages of women are at higher risk of gender-based violence, a problem prophesied by the historical example of indentured women. Indenture-like conditions and contracts still fetter immigrant laborers (many of them South Asians) in the Persian Gulf. Descendents of indentured laborers—including the large Guyanese diaspora in New York City3—continue to struggle with social problems rooted in indenture and colonialism: alarming rates of intimate partner violence, alcoholism, poverty, and gender inequality.
The legacy of exploited female labor continues to haunt the imagination, too. Last summer, artist Kara Walker exhibited A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. Her colossal sculpture, created from white sugar crystals, showed a naked black woman recumbent like a Sphinx, her private parts swollen and exposed, her babies hefting baskets of molasses around her. Walker’s work referenced the ways—economic, sexual, and reproductive—in which the bodies of women of color were used in colonial sugar economies.
In a sense, there is mordant, poetic justice in the fact that what befell the bodies of our female ancestors says more about their condition than they themselves could. Who “coolie women” were—and who we, their descendants, are—is at its heart a story about the demand for women’s bodies, for labor, for sexual gratification, and for procreation. (This, too, was work: their wombs were factories for future workers.) The ongoing violence against women in the Caribbean challenges now, as it did then, popular narratives of the region as a getaway. It is an escape only for some.
After earthquake, labor advocates call for 'kafala amnesty' so Nepali migrant workers in Gulf can return home.
“The total figure to rebuild Nepal is something like 10 days of Qatar’s GDP,” said Tim Noonan, director of campaigns and communications at the ITUC. “We think it’s incumbent on the three countries to make a massive effort and to repay the debt they owe the Nepali people.”
“Some segment of the Third World poor that has ‘globalized’ itself has come to see the family as a bit of a lie - or at least as unrealistic. If the immigrant bourgeoisie holds in place a physically real family in the suburbs, which is by many accounts so pathologically mutated that it is incapable of being a space that reproduces anything we understand as family, the working immigrant’s family has turned this on its head and holds [family] up as simply unrealistic under global capitalism”
Today, black Muslims stand at the intersection of the War on Drugs’ institutional racism and the War on Terror’s institutional Islamophobia: their race frames them as prone to gang violence, their religion as a terrorist threat. Abdul-Alim’s case shows the extreme measures the FBI is willing to use to pressure Muslims to work as informants on the terror war’s domestic front.
Through the colonial language policy, it was the British who officially differentiated between Urdu and Hindi. As is well known, they began with the idea that Hindus and Muslims were two separate “races”, each with its own history, culture and language. They attempted to categorise the languages of Hindustan on the basis of religion and culture. It was John Borthwick Gilchrist who first identified language with script and religion. He identified three different styles of Hindustani: first, a highly Persianised and urbane variety of Hindustani in Persian script practised in the courtly centres with a large concentration of Muslims, which he associated with Muslims; second, a rustic and rural Hindi/Hindavi largely free of the influence of Persian and Arabic words, spoken largely in the countryside with a predominantly Hindu population, which he identified with Hindus; and a third, a middle style between the two which was neither heavily Persianised nor rustic, but was close to the polite speech with an admixture of Persian and Arabic words assimilated into it. He called this middle style Hindustanee and advocated its promotion as the standard language that would cater to both the Muslim and Hindu populations. However, during his stint at the Fort William College as Professor of Hindustanee, he actively promoted two different styles as two different languages – Hindustanee in Persian script, which came to be associated with Urdu and Hindavi/Hindui in Nagari script, from which all foreign (Arabic/Persian) words were purged. This differentiation and dichotomy were to prove providential and to influence and shape subsequent colonial language policies.
The imagination of humanitarian work as neutral and one that maintains independence from any political inclination has allowed aid agencies unencumbered access to victims of war and natural disasters. Yet, it has also helped maintain the structural conditions of risk and precarity by de-limiting its scope and handling disasters without engagement with the politics that leave so many at the brink.
“We should be resettled there”: On the Limits of Humanitarianism
South Asians Demand Climate Justice at People’s Climate March in New York
The New York event saw three generations of South Asian environmental activists coming together to learn and march. It started with members of the Bangladeshi community sharing their hopes for the talks. According to Sayed Rahman from the Bangladesh Environmental Network, “while world leaders are dithering, climate refugees in Bangladesh are living with the consequences of catastrophic climate change created by major greenhouse gas polluters like the United States and Europe. We call on world leaders, particularly President Obama and the U.S. Congress, to work toward ambitious international emissions reduction targets.”
The large Sikhs for Climate Justice group began the morning with a prayer before the march, linking their environmental activism with their faith. According to Bandana Kaur, environmental researcher and Program Ambassador of EcoSikh, “we march because this understanding of the universe is embedded within the Khalsa ideal for Sikhs—a word that also signifies the sovereign body of Sikhs who make a commitment to protecting the most marginalized among us, a strong call to environmental justice.” Sonny Singh of Red Baraat and a small army of musicians marched with the group, providing an energetic soundtrack to a charged and emotional day.
New York-based organizing groups emphasized the links between local and global. Padma Seemangal of the Indo-Caribbean Alliance said her group was participating because “As a community we have witnessed first-hand the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy both in our neighborhood and across New York City.” Rasel Rahman, a senior community organizer at Chhaya CDC sees deep links between the global climate justice movement and his agency’s housing rights work in New York. “From Hurricane Sandy in New York to mega-floods in Kashmir, climate change robs communities around the world of their support systems. We demand equitable reinvestment in all our communities, and call for UN Climate Summit participants to fully fund the Green Climate Fund.”
“Desis can play a critical role in the American climate movement,” described Barnali Ghosh of the San Francisco Bay Area-based group Brown and Green: South Asian Americans for Climate Justice. “South Asia is climate ground zero, and our actions in the United States can either reduce the risk or further endanger 1.7 billion people. That means every time we take action in the US to vote for climate leaders, shut down another dirty energy facility, divest from mega-polluters, or reinvest in real solutions, we achieve a double victory—not only helping communities in the US, but simultaneously also in our homelands. We call on President Obama to show world leadership in ending public funding of the dirty energy economy.”
Devika Ghai of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action was one of twenty community members participating in a parallel climate rally taking place in Oakland, California. She worried about her grandmother, whose community had been affected by the 2013 Uttarakhand floods in India. Ghai compared the climate crisis to colonialism, where much of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon has been monopolized by a small group of industrialized nations, while residents of the most vulnerable communities around the world pay the price.
Linked events were held in every South Asian country Saturday and Sunday. “Even though we bear the least responsibility for causing global greenhouse gas emissions, we are being hit the hardest,” writes Nepalese Youth for Climate Action and other organizers of the People’s Climate March Kathmandu. “Climate change is an extreme global injustice as well as a contributor to inequality. Urgent action is needed to reduce emissions and support the poorest to adapt to climate change. The UN climate summit provides a historic opportunity.”
After the New York event, writer and performer Alok Vaid-Menon, known for their work with South Asian spoken word group DARKMATTER, blogged about the day, referencing those most impacted by climate injustice, including “the Global South, indigenous peoples, gender minorities, poor people, small farmers, fisherfolk, and nomadic peoples. We regard climate change not as a phenomenon that is created by ‘humans’ but by the continuation of colonial systems into the atmosphere. The division of ‘humans’ and ‘environment’ is itself a colonial one. ‘Climate change’ is not a failure of Western capitalism, but actually the total success and realization of it. The same poverty-generating systems that built the West are the ones wreaking havoc on the water, air, and land. The ‘solution’ then, is not to get down to 350 parts per million, or to institute a carbon tax, or create more solar panel startups, or fund another wind farm, or screw in better light bulbs. The goal is to continue to fight state violence, colonialism, and capitalism at their roots.”
List of organizations participating in the South Asians for Climate Justice contingent at the People’s Climate March:
Brown & Green: South Asian Americans for Climate Justice (www.brownandgreen.org)
DRUM South Asian Organizing Center (www.drumnyc.org)
Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia (www.southasiaalliance.org)
Alliance of South Asians Taking Action (www.asata.org)
[at parallel San Francisco Bay Area event]
Association for India’s Development, NYC (www.aidnyc.org)
Indian Youth Climate Network (www.iycn.in)
For the press: Representatives of each of these groups are available for interview, and additional photos are available. Please call +1 510-859-7531 or email [email protected].
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