Decolonize Belly Dance @decolonizebellydance-blog - Tumblr Blog

Queer Nations

I don't have words of my own in reaction to what happened this morning. Many of the things friends have shared today resonate strongly with me. To add to that, to be useful, I thought I'd point out the rich body of postcolonial queer literature that has played a massive role in Francophone literature in the Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria). The first queer novel I ever read was The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun (I recommend it highly).

And I've just been looking through a book I read recently called Queer Nations by Jarrod Hayes (2000). In the introduction, the author notes that "the French blamed homosexuality on the bad influence of Arabs on French soldiers in Algeria". Homosexuality played a critical role in Orientalism and North Africa served as a playground for bourgeois Europeans seeking gay and non-normative sexcapades throughout the duration of the colonial project. To the 19th century European imagination, Arabs were backward because they practiced sodomy. Meanwhile, Israeli pinkwashing posits Arabs as backwards because of their sexual conservatism and aims to further provoke a clash of civilizations.

"If there must be such an effort to exclude the queer from the Nation... and show she is an outsider trying to invade, the queer must be inside already; that is, in some ways the Nation is always already queer... When Maghrebian authors formulate representations of homosexuality, sodomy, homoeroticism, lesbianism, cross-dressing, the joys of emasculation, women's resistance, public unveiling, and feminist guerrilla warfare, they do not merely challenge sexual taboos, sexual normativity, and patriarchy (which they do); they also reveal the queerness of the Nation. They articulate a heterogenous Nation that national elites cannot use as a weapon against its own citizens.."

Turning to The Sand Child, Hayes writes that "Ben Jelloun's allegory of gender demonstrates that at the origin of gender... there is a violence that must be forgotten for gender to be naturalized. By uncovering this violence, he also narrates the deconstruction of gender. Given the parallel of narratives of gender and of Nation, L'enfent de sable and La nuit sacrée, when read as national allegories, rewrite the Nation as founded not on the subordination of one gender to another but on gender insubordination."

We don't know many background details on the Orlando shooter, who wouldn't have been a fan of these books. As friends post warnings against Islamophobia in the wake of the attack, I wanted to add that you can't have an understanding of queer history, art or literature without acknowledging the role of the Arab world in it. Queering the Nation doesn't just celebrate diverse sexualities and genders: it deconstructs the supposed moral superiority of the Nation, unravelling borders and creating new geographies of solidarity and social rebellion.

FILTERING

theoldreclaimingasia

my best friend is dressing as a gypsy for Halloween and it has a head piece that looks cultural. Is that cultural appropriation?

G*psy is an anti-Romaniyist slur. Your friend’s costume is quite racist and is definitely cultural appropriation as Romani people are constantly seen like this. I suggest you look at takingbackourculture’s tag on Romani people (and if you have any specific questions, consult their Romani mod).

-Mod N

(via Why racial justice is not what we need at this moment)

leighpatel

/

11 hours ago

What a week for the study of race. Rather than she whose name has already had too much airtime, I start with the violence the Dominican Republic is enacting on some of its own citizens. I’ll connect to what’s her name and why neither the confusion and cacophony that’s transpired in her wake nor the DR’s more brazen racial violence that has slipped by surreptitiously can be upended through the concept of racial justice but let’s, please please, start in a different place.

In three days, hundreds of thousands of people in the Westernized hemisphere will become both stateless and immediately closer to suffering and possibly premature death. Staring on June 17th, the Dominican Republicwill actively round up and deport residents who cannot provide government-issued proof of their Dominican nationality. The DR government has put in place a number of registration centers that are woefully understaffed and underqualified; a gestural bone to claim that the edict is anything but conscripted ethnic cleansing. One can imagine a newcomer to this news being a bit perplexed:

Which residents?

Good question. Those of Haitian descent.

But how would one know who is of Haitian descent?

Another good question. Those with Haitian features.

What the hell are Haitian features?

A lesser asked, and vexing question, but ok: Features that are blacker. There, happy?

No, not so much.

The DR’s edicts are flimsy and offensive in a number of ways. They are depressingly familiar with even a fleeting grasp of the violence that is part and parcel of the creation, protection, and assertion of borders. They are ridiculous by the obvious yet almost equally denied fact that there are, in fact, thousands of Dominicans with Haitian ancestry and vice versa; that the inhabitants of the island are more connected than asunder through shared histories of coloniality, slavery, and the diaspora. Superseding and spanning the contradictions and ahistoricity is the edict’s logic of a racialized fantasy of nationhood, birthed and disciplined through metrics of antiblackness. The core of the policy, as was the fundamental malicious assertion of Trujillo’s multi-pronged strategy to racially whiten his half of the island, is that blackness itself is a category lesser, unto itself and therefore to be purged.

Race is used in the DR’s thinly veiled anti-black edicts in order to promulgate the associated constructs of borders, nationhood, and statelessness. This human rights violation is not restricted to migrants but has been seeded to particularly target Dominican citizens of Haitian descent, a target that crystallizes, arguably more than any other border enforcement policy of late, the fallacy and flimsiness of state-conferred legality. Race is invoked to backwards map and justify the preservation of statehood for some and statelessness for others.

Race is a figuration, a fake, made up thing with material, crushingly real consequences. As Chinua Achebe taught, everything is a fiction. The question is if it is a beneficent or malignant fiction. Race is a malignant fiction, constructed and policed to stratify the human from the nonhuman. The challenge after thousands upon thousands of words have been said and written about Rachel Dolezal, and so few have been written about the DR’s racialized proclamations of statehood is if we are collectively closer to understanding race as a malignant fiction with a vice grip. More interesting than anything Rachel Dolezal or her parents have said this week is the frenetic energy around them, mostly fueled by a woeful lack of understanding of race as a construct as well as its material purpose and effect. That these fifteen minutes have lasted so painfully long is testimony to how strong of a hold racial categories have on us, and that is in no way restricted to the United States.

Additionally, the reach of these fifteen minutes and the concurrent cursory attention to the much more widely impactful edicts of the DR is testament to the pervasive dominance of whiteness. The construct of race works to preserve whiteness as human while making others, with blackness as the fulcrum, questionable, co-optable, deportable. Rachel Dolezal’s activities and words have garnered so much more attention precisely because she is recognized in media coverage as white. Her humanness was already always present. The proximity to suffering and death known by hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent is the flip side of that racial coin; always already ineligible, as Lisa Marie Cacho terms it.

And yet, much as it would seem somewhat logical to seek redress of racialized violence and dehumanization through racial justice, that is exactly the kind of wrong-headed remedy born of a society that is overly constricted by both race as a construct and loose ideas of justice.

At the moment, justice is often proffered in a sort of vagueness that is unlikely to be able to be of much good in dismantling the shapeshifting hydra that white supremacy is. We live in a time when it is said, with straight faces, that corporations can act consciously, and that racism can be addressed in the barter space of making, delivering and charging marked up prices for coffee and sugar, two of the core staples of transnational slavery and colonialism. This kind of foolishness is offered up without irony under the mantle of justice. Justice has become a brand and is therefore if not evacuated of promise, at least sputtering a bit. This is not to say that justice should be embargoed as an inherently corrupt concept but rather that time and energy cannot be wasted in leveraging a concept uttered, in the moment, so ubiquitously as to be meaningless. Or worse, used as a brand with ease. But the project of dismantling or eradicating must be made more specific, and that can only be done through understanding the specificity and origins of injustice.

Racial injustice is not solely that one transgressed a category, even for one’s benefit. The category itself is a fiction so to say the sin is solely in the transgression is to lose the material analysis of what the category serves and disserves. The injustice is that one leveraged the fiction for one’s benefit and therefore furthered the structured fiction in all of its malignancy. This is what the DR is doing, having learned well from the imperial and protectionist policies of many nation/states, including the United States, and this is what Dolezal has done. But as with the DR’s logic that connects its contradictions, the attention given to Dolezal’s trials and tribulations houses the more insidious logic of whiteness as human. This focus speaks volumes of who is afforded nuance, detail, and core humanness. Rachel Dolezal’s story of deception is, in large part, allowed to be fascinating because as a white woman, she enters with full eligibility for humanness. The questions of what she did, what she didn’t do, and why conjure sometimes sociological and historical but persistently psychological and philosophical questions, questions about humanity. Her humanness matters because her humanness is above reproach, even while her racial identity is debated. Are we to believe that racial justice is countering, disallowing or disavowing Dolezal’s practices or perhaps revising the DR’s documentation policies for kinder, gentler terms of racialized statehood?

I do not understand how a fiction birthed to enact, meter out, and discipline human from inhuman can be the source of humanity. I do not believe that the resolution of a malignant fiction lies in anything but destroying the fiction. And that means writing and rewriting other histories and possibilities into existence. That means crowding out and choking the malignant fiction through narratives that are truer, harder, and therefore strategically eluded. I fear that the ubiquity and vagueness of justice, at the moment, will serve, regardless of intention, to strategically muffle material moves to dismantle and upend white supremacy.

So rather than pursue racial justice, we’d do better to decenter whiteness as the default for humanity. I’d rather that our attention spans weren’t so generous and focused for a single white woman’s tabloid-like escapades. Instead, we should find and maintain focus on the humanity, the history, the psychology, the undeniable vibrancy, the embodied beingness of black and brown peoples. Particularly when under such sustained, full frontal assaults. How dare we divert our attention from attacks on humanness to dally and attempt to make just what was created expressly to deliver injustice.

Confronting Transphobia in the Belly Dance World

Today, I was blocked by a UK based dancer and teacher who I have always admired and held great regard for on Facebook. This person had posted an extremely transphobic commentary about Caitlyn Jenner on her Facebook wall. I won’t repeat it word for word, but she linked to a Blaze article about how trans women are all just sick, perverted men with an extreme form of mental illness. I was surprised at how many “likes” this status update got, and that so many people wrote transmisogynistic and transphobic comments below it. I commented that she was being transphobic and she blocked me. I won’t name names, because it isn’t helpful and because I don’t think that this is the only person in the belly dance community who thinks like this. Caitlyn Jenner hasn’t gone without criticism from the trans community. But none of these criticisms have focused on her decision to transition, nor has anyone in the trans community accused her of being a pervert or someone who selfishly abandoned her family. Whatever Jenner’s history may be (and we should be aware that her story going viral has a lot to do with the fact that reporting on a trans celebrity who has gone through multiple divorces and who has been estranged from her children many times – even though it was prior to her transition – will sell a lot more papers to a public that wants to see trans people as twisted, sick individuals), it’s really important to challenge the narrative that trans people abandon their families. In reality, it’s often the opposite. A 2014 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA found that 57% of transgender respondents were shunned or ignored by family members. On top of that, the study reported that most respondents had experienced “discrimination, victimization, or violence at school, at work, and when accessing health care”, “discrimination, victimization, or violence by law enforcement”, and a whopping 69% had experienced homelessness. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, one in five trans people have experienced homelessness and “family rejection and discrimination and violence have contributed to a large number of transgender and other LGBTQ-identified youth who are homeless in the United States – an estimated 20-40% of the more than 1.6 million homeless youth”.

Transphobia (hateful comments about trans people) and transmisogyny (which is really just a combination of transphobia and sexism) isn’t a harmless expression of bigotry. It’s extremely dangerous. Suggesting that a woman who was not born a woman decided to be a woman because she wanted to have sex with men contributes to the oppression of trans women, who experience a significantly higher level of sexual violence than cis (those of us who have kept the gender we were born with) women. Trans women face violence and danger in male spaces like bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, and homeless shelters, while being excluded from women’s spaces by women who refuse to acknowledge that the oppression of trans women and the oppression of women are two sides of the same coin.

Most belly dance instructors I know are dedicated towards helping women build confidence, comfort, and pride in their bodies. And in this age of intersectionality, more and more of my dancer friends have embraced students and performers of all gender identities and backgrounds. For so many of us, the belly dance class has offered a safer space where we can feel comfortable in our own skin, away from the patriarchal gaze. Why shouldn’t this space be available to all women? Why can’t we recognize that our body issues and the struggles of trans women come from the policing of what it means to be a woman, and what the ideal female body should look like? If we deny other women the right to be accepted as women, we are only reproducing the very system that oppresses us.

If you see or hear hate speech in our community, please speak up. We can be better than this.

#bellydance transphobia transmisogyny feminism transfeminism

ishanijasmin

The commodification of culture is ‘you can wear it, but I can’t’.

Cultural appropriation is the same - ‘You can wear it, but I can’t!’ cries the white person as they drench themselves in henna, superglue a bindi to their forehead, and refuse to brush their hair for weeks on end.

Growing up, I was surrounded by white kids. They said I smelled dirty every time I got back from visiting my family, or when I went to school the morning after my mother had made a particularly strong curry. They complained to their parents, who complained to their teacher, who complained to my parents, who gently told me that I spilled rice on the table at lunch time. Thus the switch to white bread and red meat began - bleaching myself from the inside out. School meals fucking sucked. I was banned from using my tastebuds for years.

Every time I went to Delhi, I would leave with henna on my hands - my mother would take me to the market in a rickshaw and we’d sit there for half an hour while some stranger drew these beautiful things all over me, and I would watch him, fascinated, on a stool before me, his legs splayed out. We’d hand him a few coins and be on our way, and she’d stop for panipuri on the way home. I’d be careful not to wipe my hands on the rickshaw rail, careful not to wipe my hands on anything . I’d smell the traces of India on my clothes, and washing them the evening I got home would always be a little sad.

'You can wear it, but I can't.'

Kids ran away from me at school like I was poison ivy. Convinced that I would give them a horrible disease, or if I didn’t, I probably smelled anyway so there was no reason to go within a thirty foot proximity of me. Their parents would encourage them - instating bans on ever ending up at my house when they saw my mother pick me up in the playground with a bindi on her forehead one day, when they heard my father’s strong accent. Like they’d have wanted to go to my house anyway.

'You can wear it, but I can't.'

Funnily, I can’t wear it. I can’t wear the sari, the lengha or the bindi, even now, without someone looking me up and down with disgust. ‘Get out of our country’; ‘dothead’; ‘Paki’; ‘lousy immigrants, running our healthcare systems to lock us out’; it’s all the same to me.

'But it's cool to wear it at Coachella, right? At the party next week? I saw Madonna doing it, it's completely in right now.' And if I say no, I'm the bad guy, and it's people like me that are keeping the stereotype of Indian people alive - they're all freshies, they don't belong here and they're just, like, so intrusive. What's with them taking all our jobs? Why is there one behind every corner shop counter and on every call centre line? Why are all the doctors in my local hospital brown, yet the receptionist is white? Seems like some kind of supremacy, right?

Thus the commodification of my culture continues. I watch crystal bindis being marked up to be sold in Forever21 and Topshop when I can buy them on the street in Delhi for a tenth of the cost. I see girls I knew in primary school plaster Friday night pictures of them in their bodycon dress and their bindi spot with a mixer in their hand all over my news feed, and I know that this is how it is -

'You can wear it, but I can't.'

I have somehow been locked out of a culture that I want to be proud of; I am rejected as the fresh off the boat immigrant who’s going to give everyone a disease with their dirty hands. On me it’s dirt, worthy of a slur in my direction and an inside joke with the next white person you see - but on you, it’s chic. It’s cheerful and oh-so-boho-indie-pastel-pale-cute.

You point with your left hand, and painstakingly apply your bindi spot with the right. Then you forget about it, because you can afford to, and adjust your sari in the mirror with both.

revolutionaryeye

decolonizebellydance-blog

"The whole world is talking about us, Kurdish women"

The whole world is talking about us, Kurdish women. It has become a common phenomenon to come across news about women fighters in magazines, papers, and news outlets. Televisions, news sites, and social media are filled with words of praise. They take photos of these women’s determined, hopeful, and radiant glances. To them, our rooted tradition is a reality that they only recently started to know. They are impressed with everything. The women’s laughter, naturalness, long braids, and the details of their young lives feel like hands extending to those struggling in the waters of despair. There are even some, who are so inspired by the clothes that the women are wearing, that they want to start a new fashion trend!

They are amazed by these women, who fight against the men that want to paint the colours of the Middle East black, and wonder where they get their courage from, how they can laugh so sincerely. And I wonder about them. I am surprised at how they noticed us so late, at how they never knew about us. I wonder how they were so late to hear the voices of the many valiant women who expanded the borders of courage, belief, patience, hope, and beauty. I do not want to complain too much. Perhaps our eras just did not match. I just have a few words to say to those who only now begin to notice us, that’s all.

Now one half of us is missing. If there is no past or future in your environment, one feels like a sound, an upsurge that gets lost in the black holes of the universe. The excitement and beauty of today can only be measured by those who were able to carry it to this day and their ability to carry it further to the future. In the cry of Zîlan (Zeynep Kinaci), who detonated herself in 1996 is the breath of Besê, who threw herself off the cliffs in the Dersîm uprising in the 1930s, saying “You cannot catch me alive” and that of Berîtan, who surrendered neither her body, nor her weapon to the enemy, when she threw herself off the mountain cliffs in 1992. It is the reason why YPJ fighter Arîn Mirkan made a mountain wind blow through a desert town, when she detonated herself rather than surrendering to ISIS, in order to cover her retreating comrades in Kobanê this October.

In the hearts of the Yezidi women, who take up arms against the men with the black flag is the homesickness of Binevs Agal, a Yezidi woman, who joined the guerilla from Germany in the 1980s and crossed continents to return to her country. In the words of Ayse Efendi, the co-president of the Kobanê people’s assembly, “I will die in my homeland,” is hidden the odin of the rebellious Zarife, who fought in the Dersim uprising. In the smile of the YPJ fighter, who poses with her child while carrying a rifle, is the hope of Meryem Colak, a psychologist, who chose to fight in the mountains and who often shared with us her longing for the daughter she left behind. Deniz Firat, a Firat News journalist, who was killed by ISIS in Makhmur in August, learned to search for truth from Gurbetelli Ersöz, a journalist and guerrilla fighter who died in clashes in 1997. Sema Yüce (Serhildan), who set herself on fire in protest in a Turkish prison in 1992, whispered the secrets of the fire to Leyla Wali Hussein (Viyan Soran), who self-immolated in 2006 to draw attention to the situation of Abdullah Öcalan.

Those who today wonder about why the “Girl with the Red Scarf”, a Turkish girl, who was disillusioned from the state after the Gezi-Park protests, would join the mountains, would have known the answer if they had known Ekin Ceren Dogruak (Amara), a Turkish revolutionary woman in the PKK whose grave stone says “The girl of the sea who fell in love with the mountains” and Hüsne Akgül (Mizgin), a Turkish guerrilla fighter of the PKK, who died in 1995. Those surprised at the US Americans, Canadians joining the YPG are those who do not know Andrea Wolf, a German internationalist in the PKK, who was murdered in 1998 and whose bones were thrown into a mass grave, and whose memorial could not be tolerated by the state.

Our calendar did not run parallel to the world’s calendar. These women’s gaze was focused on the depths of the far distance, their steps were fast. In order to bring the future closer, they were so impatient that they did not leave a single bridge behind. These two reasons kept us apart from the realities of the world. That is why the world did now know the women in the mountains, tens, then hundreds and later thousands of them, in the same time frame. Now it’s time to combine calendars, to set clocks. It is time to tell these women’s life stories that swung between dream and reality, their happy moments that sound like fairy tales, the ways in which loss has proven to be our most egregious teacher in our quest for truth. Now is the perfect time to entrust what I was able to carry from the past to this day. In order to join the world’s calendar, I will carry our past to the present. May my past be your present.

I wake up on a cold spring morning of Cirav in 1997. I throw the nylon, moistured from the frosty night, off me and I see a face, different from those of the swarthy warriors, in front of me. As if the sun had only mildly radiated on this face. As if her hands, her smile described elegance and nobility. I am happy that a warrior who is newer than me had arrived, that I had become a little old. I later find out that I had a five-year guerrilla in front of me. At the time, I knew only her code name; Zinarîn… If it wasn’t for the white strings in her hair or the way sorrow sometimes carried her smile away, you would not understand that she had been a guerrilla for five years. I am unaware of the pains she experienced, the sacrifices she made in her quest for truth. I am going crazy, being curious about what she is writing into her notebook, as she takes refuge under the shadow of a tree. The feelings that she felt in the short life that I shared with her, I later read in Zinarîn’s diary after her martyrdom.

I am in autumn 1997. A day on which the weary feet of autumn try to drag us towards winter. A day in which sorrow does not conquer Haftanin, but our hearts. I learn about Zinarîn’s martyrdom months later. I’m still vulnerable to the pain of loss. As I wander around with unchained rage, Meryem Colak reads on my face how my soul boils with pain. As I stopped talking to anyone upon Zinarîn’s death, she asks “Are you mad at us?” and answers the question herself “Don’t be angry at us, be angry at the enemy”. From that day on, my immunity towards loss increases. A few months later, I learn that Meryem Colak, when heading towards Metina in order to exit the operation field with a group of women on her side, was killed in a tank ambush. I learn from the witnesses of the moment that she spent her last energy to speak not to send greetings to her daughter, but to entrust her companions with her weapon, cartridge belt and codes.

It is 1999. I am in the Zagros mountains that did not permit Alexander’s army passage, but where the guerrilla managed to open paths. We are halfway through a long journey that would last a month. With me is the 22-year old Sorxwîn (Özgür Kaya). Our Sorxwîn, who allows the mountain conditions to rule over her body, but who will not allow her child’s heart to submit to the laws of war. A commander, a companion, a woman, and a child. Each one of her identities adds a different beauty to her. The best part of the one-month long arduous journey is her cheering us on to keep marching. Of course it was this child called Sorxwîn that invented children’s games to give us strength. Mischievously laughing, she says “This is nothing. I can carry a BKC with 400 bullets on my back, so I will climb this hill in four hours without a break”.

These women could not catch up with our time because they rushed towards the fire like butterflies. But they have been living on for three generations. Three generations grow up with their stories, carry their names, listen to the burning songs dedicated to them. They pick up the riffles that these women left behind and take off to Shengal, Kobanê, Botan, Serhat. They leave to bring light to the world that the men with the black flag want to darken. And their names are Zinarîn, Berîtan, Zîlan, Meryem, Sorxwîn, Arjîn, Amara, Viyan, Sara… Source:-http://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/love-and-utter-solidarity/

161crewpoland-deactivated202004

ishanijasmin

The commodification of culture is ‘you can wear it, but I can’t’.

Cultural appropriation is the same - ‘You can wear it, but I can’t!’ cries the white person as they drench themselves in henna, superglue a bindi to their forehead, and refuse to brush their hair for weeks on end.

Growing up, I was surrounded by white kids. They said I smelled dirty every time I got back from visiting my family, or when I went to school the morning after my mother had made a particularly strong curry. They complained to their parents, who complained to their teacher, who complained to my parents, who gently told me that I spilled rice on the table at lunch time. Thus the switch to white bread and red meat began - bleaching myself from the inside out. School meals fucking sucked. I was banned from using my tastebuds for years.

Every time I went to Delhi, I would leave with henna on my hands - my mother would take me to the market in a rickshaw and we’d sit there for half an hour while some stranger drew these beautiful things all over me, and I would watch him, fascinated, on a stool before me, his legs splayed out. We’d hand him a few coins and be on our way, and she’d stop for panipuri on the way home. I’d be careful not to wipe my hands on the rickshaw rail, careful not to wipe my hands on anything . I’d smell the traces of India on my clothes, and washing them the evening I got home would always be a little sad.

'You can wear it, but I can't.'

Kids ran away from me at school like I was poison ivy. Convinced that I would give them a horrible disease, or if I didn’t, I probably smelled anyway so there was no reason to go within a thirty foot proximity of me. Their parents would encourage them - instating bans on ever ending up at my house when they saw my mother pick me up in the playground with a bindi on her forehead one day, when they heard my father’s strong accent. Like they’d have wanted to go to my house anyway.

'You can wear it, but I can't.'

Funnily, I can’t wear it. I can’t wear the sari, the lengha or the bindi, even now, without someone looking me up and down with disgust. ‘Get out of our country’; ‘dothead’; ‘Paki’; ‘lousy immigrants, running our healthcare systems to lock us out’; it’s all the same to me.

'But it's cool to wear it at Coachella, right? At the party next week? I saw Madonna doing it, it's completely in right now.' And if I say no, I'm the bad guy, and it's people like me that are keeping the stereotype of Indian people alive - they're all freshies, they don't belong here and they're just, like, so intrusive. What's with them taking all our jobs? Why is there one behind every corner shop counter and on every call centre line? Why are all the doctors in my local hospital brown, yet the receptionist is white? Seems like some kind of supremacy, right?

Thus the commodification of my culture continues. I watch crystal bindis being marked up to be sold in Forever21 and Topshop when I can buy them on the street in Delhi for a tenth of the cost. I see girls I knew in primary school plaster Friday night pictures of them in their bodycon dress and their bindi spot with a mixer in their hand all over my news feed, and I know that this is how it is -

'You can wear it, but I can't.'

I have somehow been locked out of a culture that I want to be proud of; I am rejected as the fresh off the boat immigrant who’s going to give everyone a disease with their dirty hands. On me it’s dirt, worthy of a slur in my direction and an inside joke with the next white person you see - but on you, it’s chic. It’s cheerful and oh-so-boho-indie-pastel-pale-cute.

You point with your left hand, and painstakingly apply your bindi spot with the right. Then you forget about it, because you can afford to, and adjust your sari in the mirror with both.

beastthebeautiful

Where are all the #AllLivesMatter people? NAACP bombing and 2000 people killed in Nigeria, but all focus is on Paris. . . This silence is deafening.

reorientmag

As Tanavoli jubilantly talks to me about the book he and his apprentices are working on – a three-dimensional Book of Heech – and takes me on a tour of his workshop, with its bits of scrap metal scattered about here and there, I begin likening the affable septuagenarian (who I reckon bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Shah) to a naqqal, a traditional Persian storyteller. Like the gosans of the Parthian era, the bards of today impassionedly recite epic tales and parables from the vast repository of Iranian lore, roving from stage to stage, coffeehouse to coffeehouse, as conduits of myth and magic. While he may not be a man of many words, he, like the fabled Farhad, is a poet and storyteller of form and beauty. Concealed within the artist’s resplendent, undulating figures and images can be found not only pearls of Persian wisdom and universal truths, but also pages from tales of world-conquering kings, soul-conquering poets, rambling tribesmen, and tragic heroes; verily do they tell, with eloquence and artistry, the story of the land of Iran.

Read the full article here

actegratuit

One Student’s Epic Tweets Call Out the Biggest Hypocrites Marching for Free Speech In Paris

Adding to the symbolic weight of the demonstrations, more than 40 world leaders joined the start of the Paris march, linking arms in an act of solidarity. But as Reporters Without Borders points out, not every world leader present is really a defender of free speech.

vikander

Jessica Chastain reaction to Amy Poehler’s Bill Cosby joke

rockplusbird-deactivated2016011

nextyearsgirl:

The side eye from the woman in Clooney’s left is amazing. What a shit bag.

Can we also point out how uncomfortable Helen Mirren looks, a woman who has been vocal about the fact that she has been raped.

I’m so fucking mad about this. I never heralded Tina and Amy as groundbreaking feminists. Their racism has long been a problem on their respective TV shows. And now last night they spit on the women Bill Cosby raped, they spit Helen Mirren who had to sit and listen and stay silent, they spit on other women in the audience who are undoubtedly also rape victims, they spit on me and women like me who live every fucking day with the trauma and the the guilt and the secrecy and the self-hatred and the fear.

I’m glad we’re just punch lines to them.

whiskey-and-c41

I’d like to also point out that the woman side-eyeing Clooney on the left is his wife, Amal Ramzi Alamuddin. She’s a brilliant human rights lawyer and that’s probably why she’s not fucking pleased at the joke. She’s too good for that room anyway…

fisadeepforestgreen

^ Another disgusting aspect of this: smiling male faces.

whiskey-and-c41

Right? The only man up there that doesn’t crack a smile is Don Cheadle.

iwriteaboutfeminism

crystallineprincess

The problem is when satire becomes all about kicking down. It’s not clever satire, and the whitesplaining of the context of this makes me hurt - those are still disrespectful, racial caricatures regardless of the context and I’m really disappointed at how many people this is showing...

comicsalliance

Sarah McIntyre, the author and illustrator of popular children’s books including Jampires, There’s A Shark In The Bath, and You Can’t Eat A Princess, has presented an inspiring response to the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo earlier this week. On her Twitter account she declared, “Let 2015 be the year more people from around the world take up cartooning/comics to tell their stories.”

MORE MORE MORE

agoodcartoon

thoughtful response by the guardian’s joe sacco, also expresses my thoughts on the targets of satire well

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Decolonize Belly Dance