Displace Me

A foray into people's experiences surrounding displacement and migrations, as well as a constant questioning of what the terms "displaced" and "migrant" really mean or could mean (an expansion, in many ways). This project is intensely political and personal.

[displaceme]

Introduction #2

To be brown is to be inherently displaced. Colonialism affects us all-- black, brown, 'yellow,' 'red,' those of us who have tints of it all. Imperialism technically affects a whole lot of white, or whitened (over time) people too. But I think there is something about being a person of colour that makes displacement a prerequisite to existence.

Even if you & your family grew up in the same place, the effects of colonialism/ imperialism/ shadeism/ colourism/ racism/ globalization/ liberalism cannot be denied. My father called it LPG-- Liberalization, Privatization, Globalization. Funny because LPG is also a popular gas/oil company name, at least in India. Funny because of how so much imperialism centers around oil/petroleum. /sarcasm

I think part of decolonization is recognizing the immense grief of our pasts, the struggle that has always been there. We are neither moving forward nor back; we are a conundrum in the face of the laws of physics and time, the "Love Laws" as Arundhati Roy put it in her book, The God of Small Things. To be brown, to be black, to be red yellow colour-tinted everything, to 'pass' or not pass, to be revealed in that instant of curled hair, your eyes turned towards the sunlight, your body a lover's discovery.... Well. That's decolonization. & it never, ever ends.

One of the films we watched in my class was called Which Way Home? I think the questions raised by that film are so pertinent to this project. Whether we moved legally or 'illegally,' the question of "home" haunts us, with that huge gap of dis/privilege between of course. It is the difference between being homeless on the streets, and being housed in a place that will never feel, truly, like home. (Certainly, the privilege of being housed must be recognized...)

Maybe this project is a testament to the brokenness of our lives, so lost in between what we want & what is true. I chose to focus on the fragmentation in all our lives, because it's always there. Because this was never just about me. Because "I love you" became framed in terms of possession possibly precisely because of the innate loss of the moment, the "fragile temporary" as Malika put it-- It's all we have. It's why the quote by Margaret Atwood from her poem we are hard on each other, "If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?" resonates so deeply with me. The resistance to possession is a reenactment of the trauma of displacement on a personal/global stage. It's us, remembered as only blips in the universe, but what beautiful blips we were/are!

That's why I want to focus on psychological displacement in addition to physical, geographical displacement. That's why I want to focus on homelessness as a kind of physical displacement that may or may not go across borders. Asylum as seeking services to enter a country, to get mental health services, to get services after incarceration. I don't know how far I'll get with this, but I'm going to continue anyway.

[displaceme]

The event-centered model of the imperial social formation thus works to restore the unpredictability of the twists and turns that make up the process of historical change. The recognition of unexpected moments of rupture in this model draws attention to what Duncan J. Watts calls a nonlinear view of historical causality: that is, an understanding of causality that 'renders the relationship between initial cause and ultimate effect deeply ambiguous.'

Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India, p. 18

Displacement-- initial cause not producing "ultimate" effect-- what you think will happen does not happen-- in the film Illegal Assia died but Tania escaped-- cause similar but racial/ethnic difference but also-- chance-- singular moments allowing for rupture-- who escapes and who doesn't-- movie moments-- but also the unpredictability of possibility. 

Displacement as a nonlinear continuum, a vast space between what is no longer possible & what is happening.

[displaceme]

S' story (#1)

WARNINGS: #riots, #violence, #death, #sickness, (possible) #abduction, #family problems

My paraphrasing of what my father said, from his perspective:

My mother, who comes from a Bengali Hindu family, was born in a village in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in her maternal grandfather's (Dadu's) house, but her father was from West Bengal (now in India). In her early childhood, my mother grew up mostly in her Dadu's house, but left for her baba's (father's) place in Kolkata, West Bengal almost permanently when she was about six, with occasional visits to East Bengal, seven years before Partition and six years before the riots in Kolkata. My mother's Dadu migrated during Partition to West Bengal, but not all of her joint family migrated. During the riots, many women disappeared and could not return to their original families. My mother told me many fearful stories as a child.

My father, who was a Punjabi Sikh, lost his father and three elder brothers at a very young age due to a bubonic plague that spread through India in the 1920s. My father was forced by circumstances to take up a job in the British Indian army, but eventually he ended up deserting and associating with Subhash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army (INA, a freedom fighters' army). He was hiding in Kolkata and ended up using his brother's name and driver's license to take up a job as a government chauffeur. After Independence, my father reverted back to his original name, but did not reveal his connection to the INA, as army deserters were punished severely. He eventually did reveal this connection when the left front came to power in 1967, but he died before he could take advantage of the benefits related to his past as a freedom fighter that he was entitled to.

During the 1946 riots, my father got married to a Muslim woman who he most likely abducted, and he had a daughter with her. However, one day he came home to find that his wife and child had been taken away by her relatives. He lost control of himself for a while and then unsuccessfully fought a legal battle for a few years to locate and resettle his family. Eventually he probably met my mother through some friends, who knew that my mother was in need of protection. This was because my mother had run away from home due to an affair she had had, and she was pregnant. (No one has told me this, but after putting a lot of pieces together, this is what I believe.) In spite of the pain of separation from his first wife, my father married my mother who was culturally and linguistically very different from him. They had a troubled relationship throughout but my father never walked out on my mother.

[displaceme]

I only know the good parts of the reasons my parents migrated. I’ve heard the story of how my mom went to the states first for grad school (at [university] because her brother was there) and then later post-grad (at [ivy league university]) and how my father had to follow in order to do a masters degree at [university]: something I don’t think he had originally planned to do. I’ve heard about how they married in India and my mom told her in-laws that she was going to finish her studies in the US, nothing doing. It was all for education and the prospect of better jobs. My entire family is of the highest caste – Brahmins. Education has been in our blood even in times when women could not stay in school. English was always spoken as a first language or a close second. We are upper middle class (though some of my relatives live richer lives). My uncle went to the U.S. first followed by my mother (his sister). It would have only been possible if my grandparents had enough saved money to fund both of their children’s trips. (Though my grandmother wasn’t working my grandfather had a pretty high paying job and to this day gets a steadily increasing pension, though he now lives a simple, no frills life in [Indian city]). My parents moved around a lot because their fathers had government jobs that required constant relocation. Though they are both South Indian both my mother and father spent time in the north (my dad in boarding school in [hill town in India known for boarding schools]). My grandparents only really settled in [Indian city] when my grandfather had retired (they had a house waiting for them). Whether I like it or not, I have a significant amount of class privilege. Yes, my parents were poor in grad school and experienced racism of a different kind, but they weren’t homeless, they weren’t mistreated or abused in any way. And then, of course, there is the fact that they followed the American dream: they rose, rose, rose. I didn’t have to experience poverty growing up, because my parents had my brother and I when they were more financially stable. I did not have to work with my parents to make ends meet, I did not have to switch between languages and translate for them because their native language was English and they decided to do away with any of the other languages they had learnt in the name of simplicity. I could use them as education resources (my mother for science and English related things, my father for computer science, math and physics related fields.) I was able to go to an expensive [college] with no loans. Because of my parents work I had every material thing I wanted and didn’t want.

Malika*, on her family's history of migration and class privilege, and her own experiences of being first-generation and class-privileged.

Note from S: It is interesting how our stories are so divergent in terms of class status (although I have half-white privilege which also influences my story of class status, though my white family are mostly middle class and also lower middle-class), but also, as I told you (Malika) about, my Indian side of the family are all high-caste too (Brahmin), but at least in my father's immediate past (his parents, and presumably their parents?), they were lower class. This speaks to the way caste and class can intersect in many complicated ways. Higher caste does not necessarily mean higher class, though it often suggests that somewhere down the line there was more class privilege, at least, even if not anymore, I think? I'm not sure...

[displaceme]

When we were in [city S' mother's brother lives in] I was trying to get state healthcare for you [S] and me and I was talking to all those recordings and government people on phones. One woman said, “What makes you think you have a right to healthcare? Why don’t you go back where you came from for your healthcare?” I told her I am a citizen of USA. She was not convinced, even when I told her I was born in USA. Then I felt slightly like an immigrant. But generally I keep thinking I am not an immigrant when I am in USA, despite such incidents.

S' mother talking about the complexities of being a US citizen, white, and yet having a more Indian accent/ living in India for a long time... and experiences with returning to the US.

[displaceme]

Angst

WARNINGS: #suicide attempts, #pills, #stomach pumping, #hospitalization, #institutionalization, #overdose, #internalized #racism

[Image Description: A drawing in black ink on green paper. It is of a girl sitting sprawled  on a surface, wearing a tank top and a skirt. Her hair is shoulder-length and messy, and a tube is coming out of her mouth. The tube extends beyond her body, where there is a drawing of charcoal smears, and also several pills are sketched.]

S: I've struggled with suicidality for a long time. This is a drawing I've made that vaguely resembles me around age 15-17 or so. I've had my stomach pumped twice from overdosing on pills in attempts to kill myself. I've also made other attempts to kill myself... What does this have to do with displacement and migration, you may wonder? Well, for me, these things are inextricably related.

I begged my mother to take me to the US, I grew up hating living in India a lot of the time (for various reasons, but certainly there was a lot of my own privilege and my internalized racism at work here). There are things I can't talk about here, but eventually when my mother did try out living with me at her brother's place in the US for a year, it became clear that moving did not solve my mental illness problems. I still struggle with this realization. I live in the US now with the bitter aftertaste of feeling like I chose the US over India, always. Again, there are things I cannot talk about here. But I do know that cross-cultural alienation intersects with my mental illness and other experiences of disability. I know that the cost of multicultural perspective is the bitter realization, some way or the other, that I belong nowhere, that the world is defined by categories of race, ethnicity, and other identity formulations that none of us can fit into neatly enough (at least in so far as how they are prescribed).

I learned that I could never be white. I learned that I miss India, that I grieve for the Indianness I have lost, the Hindi I am losing more and more of, the fact that I was never fluent in any languages other than English. My deaf brain, hearing aided ears, the colonial legacy and my English-language privilege created a context in India where I could get by without being fluent in Hindi. Do I know enough to have a conversation? Who knows? Now my accent is just strange and foreign and "cute" in Hindi and really it always was... Meanwhile people crave my English language skills, and I understand that I have prospects that they do not have.

I'm still alive, but it begs the question as to whether there is ever space for being in between and up and around and under and down all at the same time...

[displaceme]

There is the idea imprinted upon me (courtesy of my parents) that only white Americans experience mental illness because they grew up in “broken homes,” because they have no direction, because they don’t know what they want to do, because they didn’t focus on their studies hard enough. Me? I couldn’t have mental illness. I’m so smart. I’m well-liked. I’m academically accomplished. I have a college degree. I had everything I could want. My parents instilled the “right” values in me. They “support” me. There’s no reason. If I have mental illness, I’m probably just feeling sorry for myself, I probably just want to be like those white people who have so many problems. Immigrants from Asia can’t have problems: we don’t have time for problems, for the irrational, for feelings. We only have time for work, work, work, procuring “the best” for our children so that they can repeat our lives, over and over again. So that, collectively, we can show white Americans how to get ahead, how to rise. Mental illness puts a wrench in the machinery – it slows you down, it goes against the idea of rising, it screws up the work your parents have done for you, so that they say that you are “missing opportunities,” so that they say “We figured it out by 19, why can’t you?,” so that they ultimately say, “Ok, fine, you have depression, but you have to do something about it.”

Malika*, on being asked about the intersections of mental illness and being a first-generation Asian-American

[displaceme]

Besides, an artwork piece by S' mother.

[Image Description: A black and white art piece. Against a grainy, starry, detailed background, there is a front-facing portrait of a person who may be standing against a balcony wall. They have grey/light hair that is shoulder-length. They are wearing what looks to be a lined shirt, and the drawing stops at their chest length.]

S' Note: My mother is white, and a US citizen. She is legally married to my father, an Indian citizen, and has been living mostly in India since the 80s.

In response to S' question, "What does 'home' mean to you?"

In a basic way, ‘home’ means where my family is. But since my family has been spread over different places in both India and the USA, ‘home’ has been confused.

Practically and physically, right now home means my flat in [part of city in India]. But I have only been here for about 1 year, and I know I will have to leave within a year, so it does not feel like much of a ‘home’. I think ‘home’ should have more permanence than this.

Sometimes when I have to fill up certain forms, I have to give a ‘permanent residence’, which is unnerving. Usually I leave it blank, or write the same thing as my ‘temporary residence’, but last time they made me write something else, so I put my mother’s address in [city in USA]. When I go to [city in USA] I do feel to some extent like it is home. But nowadays my mother refers to it as her home (not ours, which is a little disconcerting). And when I am in [city in USA], I also feel lat a loss because my work and my friends and my usual ways of doing things are not there - and because over there I have to go around in cars and even drive a car, which I hate.

I imagine the ideal home as a sunny place (with basic comforts like not too leaky, fairly good electric and water supply and a minimum of wildlife) in an Indian city with people walking all around, and shops downstairs or around the corner, and my workplace within walking distance - almost what it is right now. Having a more permanent home is what I badly need. But I have no chance of ever owning a home, and they say that if you rent then you have to keep moving every year or so.

For me, ‘home’ is definitely in India, not in USA. This is because of the way people interact with me and the way I interact with them, and because I cannot imagine working in USA. And I cannot live without working - and earning. My work is where my home is. I am also more used to being in India, and I just get a feeling of being out of place when I am in USA. This is despite my being able to communicate better in English than in the local language.

Food is much better in India (not having cheese is nice). I am more used to Indian food.

Home is a place where I think I have a purpose to be - and the purpose is work - mainly artwork. I would not be inspired to do artwork in USA, even if I could make a living at it.

[displaceme]

Straddling both worlds. Finding the “right” balance. Visiting India to remind yourself where you are originally from and behaving well (that is, not making a fuss at eating different foods and being ok with eating with your hands or off of banana leafs at functions, wearing appropriate/ cultural clothes when necessary, being polite to your elders and doing namascara to them before leaving their houses.) Taking the “opportunities” (i.e. career/education resources) of the states while leaving the bad parts behind. What are the bad parts of the US? Materialism. Not being able to cook. Leaving your children to fend for themselves (and in turn, not taking care of your parents). Going to cheap beaches and tanning until your skin gets wrinkled. Dinner at 5 in the evening. Taking care of your children the wrong way (i.e. not bending over backwards for them, letting them cry at night, letting them throw tantrums without using logic and sympathy to calm them down). Not recycling. Not valuing education.

Malika's* response to S' question, "What is it like being the child of [South Asian, Indian] immigrants?"

[displaceme]

Psychological Displacement: Elyria & Oberlin

WARNINGS: #suicide attempt, #antiblack #racism, #ableism, #sanism, #hospitalization, #institutionalization, #rape, #sexual abuse

S' Note: This is an unfinished travelogue that my friend, Sarah Harper, who is white and French-American, wrote about her experiences of psychological displacement and travels across geography and class in search of belonging.

In Ohio, the heartland of America, two towns, Elyria and Oberlin. They could not be more different.

Oberlin's a college town, dominated by its student population, the university and the conservatory. Elyria, on the other hand, is just another American small town. It has a Greyhound station, several cheap to mid-priced hotels, a Pepsi bottling plant, and a mall.

The mall is the biggest one in the county according to the brochures. I went there because after what happened to me in Oberlin, I was frantic for some reading material to distract myself with. But there was no bookstore or magazine store in the mall. There was a Borders Express listed in the directory, but it had closed down. The closest thing I could find was Sun News, which sold three local papers plus USA Today. The rest of the store space was given over to selling snacks and lottery tickets.

This was real culture shock. In New York a similar store would have all kinds of magazines, from tabloids and beauty rags to news magazines to hobbies and special interest, plus newspapers and possibly even paperback books. Here, apparently, there was no demand for that. Europeans, of which I am one thanks to my mom, would say that Americans are uncultured and so have no desire to read. But it occurred to me also that capitalism doesn't want people reading, not even trashy paperbacks; because quite aside from any intellectual value, reading's an escape. A relatively cost-free escape. Put a bookstore in a mall, and kids and adults alike might easily spend the whole day browsing through books or magazines and end up buying nothing. Without one, they're pushed towards the clothing stores, the pay-per-play kiddie attractions, and the food court.

Oberlin has several bookstores, of course, and art galleries, and a beautiful little place that serves as combination coffee shop/organic food market. One time I was there two women came in who were speaking French, no lie. There's an indefinable feeling of peace that comes from sipping tea at the little wooden tables, and a beauty there that reminds me of the girl I stayed in Oberlin with, not just because she loves the place, but because her kind of beauty is somehow of a piece with it: thin but well-fed, and vaguely hippie-looking. The coffee shop isn't alone, within a few blocks there's an American restaurant with vegan pancakes on the menu, and a Mexican place that makes a point of having “sustainably-raised” ingredients. I speak French and look vaguely hippie-ish, and try to be vegan and love organic food, so do I belong there? I thought I did—at first.

In Elyria, two people ask me if I'm Canadian. I ask one why, and he says it's because of how I talk. My mother being French, my accent might very well sound similar to a Canadian one. But I'm thinking it might also be because of the way I look. I'm thinner than most people in Elyria, and I wear interesting-looking glasses and a rainbow gay pride bracelet. I'm from New York City; I might as well be from Canada. Canada is closer to here than New York is, that's probably why they guess wrong.

The girl I stayed with in Oberlin with met me in the middle of the street with my backpack and told me she'd call the police if I ever again came near her house. A day earlier, I'd told her of my attraction to her, and when she told me she didn't feel the same, I reacted badly. I became sullenly hostile towards her, and attempted to kill myself. I didn't threaten her, but it didn't matter; she'd come to see me as monstrous. A “danger to self and others.” And she reacted with that same mixture of cold impersonal altruism, fear, and contempt that I'd been given all my life from sane people. And to think, the whole reason why I'd taken her rejection so hard was that we'd met at a conference entitled “Psychiatry as a Means of Social Control.” I'd thought that meant the rare possibility of a real relationship, where I could trust her—trust her not to use psychiatry as a means to socially control me. I was naïve and stupid. She told me, that last day, that she “cared for my well-being.” Meaning: she didn't want to see me suffer. That was also why she took such pains to hustle me out of her house as quickly as possible: because she didn't want to see me.

At the motel in Elyria, the motherly night clerk reassured me about my personal safety: something about not letting in single black males. No one would ever say that in Oberlin. Partly because they're too polite. But also because, as far as I could see, there are no black people in Oberlin.

Where do I belong? My family is comfortably upper-middle-class. But there was a worm at the heart of it: something I can't remember. Nightmares about rape. I can't go back. Since then, I've paid for emergency dental care out-of-pocket. Since then, I've chosen between food and rent. Since then, I've been put in three mental hospitals. College girls floated by me, young and altruistic, understanding nothing. “Normality” was never having to worry about money and never feeling too much, and they swam in it as through air. I felt most safe among the people my parents warned me about, the lowest of the low: poor blacks and Latinos. With them, loyalty was a value, the police were not to be trusted, and violent rage and despair were...understandable.

[displaceme]

[Image Description: A photograph of the lower half of S' legs against a black background. She is wearing purple tights and her feet are the main feature. She is wearing green and gold decorated anklets (payaliyaan).]

(written by S)

So these are my feet, all purple-bestockinged and decorated with green and gold payaliyaan. I choose this photograph as an introductory glimpse into my story. I have always loved tights, but I have not always loved payaliyaan. When I was little, I took some kathak lessons and I felt fairly indifferent about the ghunghroos I would wear for dancing. I probably thought payaliyaan and ghunghroos were pretty, but I would never have worn them in the US, or even really in India outside of the dance context. Now, I try to wear my payaliyaan in style, mixing it up as I am mixed up too.

Backtracking: Hi, my name is S and I am half white, half South Asian (Indian). My mother is white and a US citizen, and my father is brown and an Indian citizen. I am a US citizen, though I was born in India. I grew up mostly in India on extended visas, and then eventually (relatively recently), I was able to acquire an OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) card, which means I can visit and live in India easily throughout my lifetime. During the first four years of my life I spent a lot of time going back and forth between the US and India, because my parents (particularly my mother) were working in the US to some extent and also because they were trying to find out more about my disabilities and get me the support I needed. I have a relatively minor hand atypicality, and I also have moderately severe hearing loss. When I was about three and a half, I started wearing hearing aids... I often received hearing aid care in the US, though also in India. Though most of my schooling before college was in India, I spent tenth grade in the US. My experiences of biraciality and multiethnic cross-cultural confusion have intersected with my experiences of class, disability and gender/sexuality in many ways. This is the beginning of my exploration on this blog of what it means for me to be a South Asian person of colour, a survivor of many things, and a transnational supposed "globetrotter" who is really only trying to find out what home really means.

Sometimes I call my feet "Indian feet," some of the parts of me that are most visibly recognizable (at least to me) as South Asian, as brown, with all their callouses and cracked heels and dryness and toenail flavour. I am often ashamed of my Indian feet. In pictures like these, I feel prouder of them because they are covered by stockings... It seems like a small thing, but for some reason I have fixated on my feet a great deal. I have my white mother's slender feet, but they are brown, not white. Together, our feet are similar perhaps only because of genetics and also our shared experience of walking on floors so much, barefooted and in chappals, in dust and grain and all these ways that so often more privileged people's feet do not signify things. (My feelings about feet are extensive...)

I am trying to figure out whether I identify as a migrant. I have certainly moved across countries, and within countries. But I am also a much more privileged migrant than most migrants... While middle class, I have had access to things (like my education and my travels) that for many people would only be possible with more class privilege. I am starting to learn that positionality is slippery and never static... I am perceived and I perceive in ways that are constantly changing.

[displaceme]

Introduction #1

Welcome to Displace Me, a project exploring issues of migration and displacement. I seek to expand on the definitions of concepts like migration, displacement, il/legality, non/citizenship, il/legality, forced/chosen movement, geographical relocation, immigration vs emigration, psychological migration, homeland, motherland, native land, home, family, cross-cultural experience, transnationality and nationality, language, etc.

Initially the inspiration for this project comes from my taking a class at a college near where I live that explores the dynamics of displacement and migration. This is my final project for that class, but I hope to continue it beyond the scope/time period of the class as well. I hope to see this project become something of its own. The project is loosely defined around the theme of "Windows into Experiences of Migrants' Lives," but I seek to explore the concept of the "migrant" in many complex ways. Certainly, in this world, so many of us have histories (or present conditions) of migration, whether internal (within a country or area) or external (outside of a country or area). I am interested in exploring those histories/conditions and seeing how they relate to our other experiences of identity, affinity and general life circumstances.

For some of us, migration/displacement is a much more present theme in our lives. For others, it is more historically based. Sometimes it is a combination. Undoubtedly, it ends up being complicated and intersecting with various other positionalities, such as gender, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, citizenship, documentation, class, caste, education, other status, disability, neurodivergence, mental illness, size/body, etc. The stories presented here vary greatly while also showing similarities-- Eventually, Displace Me is about finding the peripheries and borderlines in our lives, and trying to express what those mean to us.

I will be sharing my story as well as my parents' stories, and the stories of several friends and acquaintances. I have collected many of these stories through interviews. I also invite you to share your own stories, whether through art, poetry, informal explanation, formal prose, or whatever medium you feel comfortable with. Please note, I am trying to make this space accessible in at least some ways (and hopefully more ways), so if you can help by providing content/trigger warnings, image descriptions, audio transcripts or captions/subtitles, video transcripts, translateable formatting, alternate formats, etc, that would be awesome. You may also feel free to ask me if you would like an interview.

Feel free to leave feedback, either at the ask box here, or by emailing displacemeproject at gmail dot com.