Ramadan 2019: Day 14-15

Day 14 Sunday

I went to Cambridge in the morning, and a random fellow in front of Smith Campus Center asked, "Is Harvard's graduation today?" I mumbled "I don't know" and continued. I did not appreciate such interactions, especially that early in the morning.

I enjoy the environment the teachers created, with flute music and inward-looking vibes. A girl later joined our two-student class, who I later found out was a reviewer of this particular yoga set. We did not have much interaction and the course ended a bit later. We received feedback from one teacher--I needed to make sure my back was straight and my hands were in the right positions during the transitions of postures. I wrote this later about this course:

Today I finished my two-day course on Surya Kriya, which is the foundation for Surya Namaskar (sun salutation). Ten years ago, I started my yoga journey at the Claremont Colleges. My teachers today, from Soma Yoga, were also fellow alumni. Still, I never imagined that I could fulfill the requirements that I did for this Isha Yoga course. A lot of yoga teaching in the US focuses on a certain body image, but I think it’s important to combine the non-physical aspects of yoga, which can help reduce karmic linkages of habits. #nonduality #karma

I said goodbye to my teachers and wished them well on their east coast yoga tour.
It started raining and I entered a nearby Mexican restaurant. They had more offerings than I expected in the burrito I ordered. Some students soon filed in as well. I left and found that many booths were set up for, possibly, a certain university's graduation day.

I made a resolve for doing 40 days of this yoga practice in a row as prescribed. Changes in schedules are a lot for my mind to process these days since not everyone shares my schedule. But such changes will be inevitable when I start my archive research as well.

I left for Chinatown for an event on Queering Asian American History and it was raining even harder. My yoga mat was stored in a paper bag so I stopped at certain moments to preserve the bag. I entered the surprisingly well-furnished building hurriedly and poured myself a cup of coffee. Janhavi gave some orientation to the room as well as the organizers of the project of Queering Asian American history. I was surprised by the amount of information they gathered over the short two weeks in-the-making.

I added some of my own posts as well, such as the Asian-cast musical film Flower Drum Song and Chinese laborer relations with Native American women. After some discussion with our small group, I was reminded about caste issues by Anju, a new member of the Pao Arts Center, and added B. R. Ambedkar's accomplishments to the timeline as well. Some people chipped in their issues with the varied definitions of "progressiveness" and "organizing," since some Asian American causes were not always "progressive." Janhavi reminded us to center queer lives, as well as the fact that some of our ancestors were queer. I never thought of framing my ancestors into Asian American history or a history of sexuality, so it was very affirming to hear that statement. I spoke in the small group but not in the big group.

The discussion soon died down. I learned a lot about Southeast Asian communities as well as a short-lived queer-and-Asian-centered newsletter located in Boston in 1984. Although the newsletter is long-gone, it is nice that people are discussing the same issues again now. I had a first-hand experience of community-engaged history, and it was eye-opening and challenging at the same time. Disagreement is a sure sign that your research is relevant to the community.

Around 3pm, the groups disassembled and started cleaning the space. Walid also arrived and we contributed as well. I was so nervous that I forgot he was fasting and offered coffee, to which he denied. Later I remembered. I also bought some lychee wulong tea from my favorite tea shop. One bad thing was that many people were staring at us, which happens sometimes.

Walid fixed his bike and then went to work to befriend coworkers and serve the community. I watched some videos on youtube and some Golden Girls. I also tried to check out some of the people who have also participated in this event and promoted their work, but I did not find any of the groups very inviting as they seemed to be.

We later shared recipes when we were both at home. My roommates also graduated on this day.  Shangliao and I discussed the Indian elections and how Chinese-language reportage on this issue sucked.

Day 15 Monday (also Malcolm X's solar-year Birthday)

Walid continued to watch recipes on Youtube in the morning at his place. We Facetimed and he later came to visit me.

Someone from college started engaging with my shared post on Yogesh Yadav's commentary on polls for particular no reason, other than him having too much time and wanting to man-spread on the Internet. I was angry, partly due to the lack of support for this area of interest. Walid comforted me and shared a quote about not losing one's inner peace over other's mistakes. I later found out that this person from college is a strong Modi supporter.

We studied Arabic at the Waitts Mountain park with an article about the singer Dalida. Walid took off his shirt for the first time in public (since I knew him).  He joked that he could advertise his teaching job with a shirtless photo. Girls were noticing his presence at his new environments as well.

I flipped through my ArtForum magazines and I read a great interview by Raqib Shaw:

It is very easy to classify something and put it in a box so you don’t have to think about it. It boils down to the fact that there are people who have different aesthetic experiences. I come from a very different culture. How many artists do you know that come from Kashmir? My work has a diasporic sense, of leaving but also carrying the memory of a culture. It is an amalgamation, a hybrid, a cocktail. The fabulous thing about it is, the more you look, the more it will reward you. But you have to have the psychological state to accept what you see and engage with it.
When a western art critic reads my work, they have absolutely no clue of the culture I grew up in, the aesthetic sense, the spiritual sense, the mentality. They don't have access to any of those things, and so what’s easiest is to call it decorative, call it kitsch, call it over the top. I’ve dedicated my damn life to this thing.

I could particularly relate to him since I have also dedicated years into my trade, oftentimes alone, and yet many spectators just hate on my work, perhaps it serves as a target for their own insecurities and failures.

Also chatted with Amina a bit as well. We have come into regular contact since a change in the friend situation. She is interested in remaking her diary into a story about her travels in India.

In the evening, I joined my WeChat group's heated discussion on Google's move to limit their operating systems from Huawei's use. I voiced some of my opinions, such as the fact that the court in the U.S. recently denied Chelsea Manning's appeal, which does not make U.S. look good at all from the perspective of tech and human progress.

Ramadan 2019: Day 6-7

Day 6
Saturdayyyyyyy but my work ethic made Walid and I go to the Boston Public Library and finish my last paper project. I prepared a peanut butter sandwich and added some dates from the milk-date drink Walid made. On the way, I read some passages from a borrowed book. When we arrived, I was angry at the library because the way whyte people take up space (one man stood right in front of the entrance as if he wanted to block us); also, people do all kinds of shenanigans in the bathrooms, such as leaving their work clothes in the stalls. I complained, this is not their home!! Walid quipped, and that is why they trash the place. The upside was that Walid successfully obtained his card.
We serendipitously sat at the immigrant help section. I finished my work around 2pm and felt dizzy. I ate the food while Walid explored the law section of the library. He borrowed Our Constitution and I also showed off some of my knowledge about American political institutions. I also felt pretty disconnected from this knowledge, despite multiple efforts in participating in public life and mused whether this was because of Boston's unique climate.

We sat in the library courtyard for a while. Some whyte people played beautiful music. An Indian family tried to take group photos with their professional camera but was stopped by a custodian, possibly due to their camera's settings. I mused about the topic I just wrote about--visualizing resistance--and how people obsessively documented their visual experiences. All the while I wished my brain could just stop analyzing. Walid thought about Mother's day.


Then Walid watched me as I ate at nearby + famous California Pizza Kitchen for the first time. I only knew about it from the show Bojack Horseman. Walid, fasting, as usual, could not even drink the ice water!

Walid thought about replicating the food at home, which we did on day 8.

I went home and watched the special series on manhood as well as other skits by the Saudi Arabia youtube sensation Telfaz 11 for hours. This type of comedy kills me because of its self-awareness, understated acting, as well as deprecation. The subtle commentary is also quite daring at times. The interludes of urban moments are also very beautiful and accurate, although I have never been there to judge...

snapshot from Telfaz11

Day 8

I woke up some more bad dreams, did the laundry with nightmare collateral damage, and read a great poem about someone's mother, which is possibly the best poem I ever read on mothers.

Screenshot from the film Intimates

I called my Syrian friend Ahmad for the first time in a while. He updated me about his life and chess progress. We also shared some rap songs. I skimmed through some of the library books due soon and learned some shocking history about the transnational nature of the Sahwa movement. I also watched a Chinese movie Intimates about women who chose to be celibates their whole lives (partly due to the patriarchal expectations of them to marry against their will). Since the late-1800s, they formed small communities in places of Guangdong and lived together with their earnings from the prosperous silk industry. The film also included a lesbian love-story plotline as well as a very realistic portrayal of an American-born-Chinese woman.


Walid arrived at my place around 6 with all the materials for halal carbonara pasta and prepared food at 7:20. I was the sous chef. He broke his fast while making a lot of food. I joked that the food was worth $60.

We watched The Avengers: Ultron and I did not realize I had already finished it before until the very end. Walid found it amusing that I had very large reactions to special effects and plot twists. I gave some of my opinions of the human-centric notions of good and evil and how both AI bots in the film are too anthropocentric.

Access to the Iraqi Field

In between a trip to Prague, I have been reading books on the modern history of Iraq, the legal history of women's rights in Iraq, and biographical narratives of diasporic Iraqi women. This coming month also marks the third year since I permanently moved from Beijing, which was my home for many years. Many reflections on diaspora and the meaning of living abroad came up when I read books on Iraqi politics as well as Kundera's classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I also compare diasporic conditions cross cultures during my time spent with the Pakistani student community in Gottingen. While the background of my interest is mostly personal, this blog post will mainly address the political issues and questions of methodologies that surfaced when I read the books on Iraq.

In her book Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, Dr. Nadje Sadig Al-Ali presents material she gathered through interviews with women from four different diasporic communities, including Amman, London, San Diego, and Detroit. There are many similarities between the Iraqi communities I am reading about in Dr. Al-Ali's work and the Pakistani community I encountered, such as the highly contested narratives of the twentieth century. Given the hetergenous makeup of the Iraqi diasporic community, with different ethnic groups, sects and classes occupying different social and political lives, the matter is evidently complex. Generations also mattered: the order of persecution entailed a different relationship with politics. This was also spelled out to me during a conversation with a Kurdish friend, P., who comes from Syrian-occupied Kurdistan. He has stayed in Germany for many years and most of his family is here. He works, studies, and likes the idea that his future would be bounded with Germany. I told him during a conversation about the sufferings of my other Syrian friend who lives in India right now and has been separated from his family since the war started. He replied that indeed, it is a hard life for my friend and other recently exiled Syrians, but his own family had established themselves abroad earlier because they have been persecuted earlier as a religious minority. In other words, my friend may suffer now, but it's because he didn't have to think about it earlier. We each receive our own due in time.

Al-Ali also addresses the sectarian issue through her experiences in the field. During her research in the U.S., she stays with various Iraqi families and acutely notices the differences in locale and socialization. During her research in Dearborn and the broader Detroit Area, the issue of sect becomes strong enough for her to voice her own opinions in this particular situation:

As I talked to the group of young women refugees, it became evident that at least this group of recently arrived women had a very strong sense of their roots and identity, both as Iraqis and Shi'is involved a strong sense of entitlement in terms of rights and privileges in the new Iraq. It also entailed a very strong and, for me personally, disturbing sectarianism that was directed not only at Sunni Iraqis but also at Iraqi Chaldeans. Khadija, just like Fatima and her sister Zeinab, criticized Iraqi Chaldeans for having been supporters of the previous regime and for failing to engage in anti-government activities in previous years. I was puzzled by this sweeping generalization and condemnation of the Chaldean community. Although several Chaldeans I talked to had clearly appreciated the generally secular nature of the previous regime, especially before 1991, which allowed for the relative religious freedom of minorities, many of the more established and well-to-do Chaldean families have been active supporters of the Bush government and his war on Iraq. (p38, emphasis my own)

I also encounter this question of methodology when I conducted research in Germany and Lucknow. When I encounter South Asian and Iraqi Muslims and explain that one of my research interests include Shi'ism, it often sends a message that I am someone who has affinity with the imagined community of Shi'as. The scope of the imagined community depends on the world view and values of the person in question, and how he or she would answer the question of "who is a Shi'a." For me, the question is extremely delicate and variable on situation.

A picture of Imam Hussain in a food store owned by Iraqis. Louisville, KY,  2016

The paragraph by Al-Ali also raises the question of politics and religion: to what extent can one draw the line between sectarianism and political activism? Many of the NGOs and charities related to Iraq claim that they service all sects, which clearly shows there are many NGOs and charities that have particular sectarian identity, subtle or not. When does a "sectarian" conversation or situation call for an activist scholar, such as Al-Ali, to intervene? This also goes back to the debate within race and sociology: is one studying a social group for the purpose of an empirical understanding, or is there an ethical obligation to that group's future? When one labels and understands situations through the lense of sects in an informed manner, the research is usually empirically rich and analytically strong. But what are the additional methodological concerns?

In evaluating narratives of women's rights in Ba'athist Iraq, historian Noga Efrati has noted in her book Women in Iraq how positionality affects the written historical accounts.

Doreen Ingrams and Deborah Cobbet present the clearest examples of following only one narrative. Whereas Ingrams favors the Iraqi Women's Union narrative, Cobbett bases her work on the League for the Defense of Women's Rights narrative. Their contrasting historical probes were probably influenced mainly by their conflicting attitude toward the Ba'ath regime as well as by their personal connections with different Iraqi women. Ingrams, at least at the beginning of the 1980s, sided with regime supporters, whereas Cobbett sided with its opponents. (p134, emphasis my own)

Furthermore, what happens when one relies on one's own group identity to gain access? Researchers such as Nadje Al-Ali (p29) as well as anthropologist Hayder al-Mohammad have mentioned how their family introduced them to certain contacts in the field. Al-Ali has also met many contacts through her own activism in London and Hayder al-Mohammad established contacts from arising circumstances over the length of five years in Basra. Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod also discusses her father's role in her field:

[M]any people remain intrigued by what I wrote about my father having introduced me to this community, perhaps because it makes us think hard about our inevitable positionality in fieldwork. I understand my father’s motives a bit differently now that I am a parent, but I also worry that people exaggerate the importance of this introduction. I still treasure the ways I was able to participate in the intimate and lively women’s world. I know that it was a bit easier for me to be part of this family because of this identity. But even though being perceived as Arab, Muslim, and respectable (under the protection of my father) was important, I don’t think we should overstate its importance. Fieldwork is intense and interpersonally complicated for everyone. Once you are there, no matter how introduced, it is you—as a person—who develops the relationships you do, even as you never escape your locatedness.

It would be an overstatement to say that their research would have been markedly different without the family contacts; still, the question is unresolved in my mind. Al-Mohammad does a wonderful job of historicizing the idea of "tribes." He questions the method which sees tribes as the dominant form of social organization in his 2011 article "You have Car Insurance, We have Tribes." Still, access to tribes were crucial in the field, and the male Iraqi identity was no doubt a gamechanger in terms of on-the-ground research. He writes, "Many leaders are very generous, not only with their wealth and power, but also with their time. Many have also been tremendously protective of me, with no hope of ever seeing anything in return other than friendship and gratitude." Identity plays such a crucial role in these sites, and thus to present oneself with an established lineage (sect or locale) affects how one is perceived in the field. I would like to read more about the implications of this approach.

Al-Mohammad passionately argues about his positionality in an interview and invokes his "brown eyes" that sees what non-brown eyes fail to see--

I have skin in this game, to invoke an idiom I am rather fond of. I’m an Iraqi. I consider Basra my home and not London where I have spent more than twenty years. The problem is, then, where can I turn to that has been relatively untarnished by the theorizers and fly-by-night Iraq specialists? What I noticed was that events, local happenings and moments, are too small for the young bucks, trying to make their name in this racket, to get their hands dirty in. They also did not have access to such experiences, nor did they have a grasp of the background knowledge and ways of life of ordinary Iraqis, hence struggled to notice the significance of certain events. Many have conducted interviews in the north of Iraq in Erbil, or outside Iraq in Amman and Cairo with Iraqi refugees, but essentially, everyday life in Iraq has been beyond the reach of the machinery.

Finally, it is appropriate to end with this observation on academia by Hayder al-Mohammad, to understand the importance of entering the field with his particular approach:

The reason why anthropologists have turned to institutions, cults, groups, and scholars is because of the obvious difficulty in locating one’s fieldwork. Not being natives of the region where they are working in, most anthropologists have few doors open to them. But what starts off as a difficulty in locating where one should, and actually could, conduct fieldwork has a very serious impact on what is studied and how it is studied. Clearly, working with religious scholars and Imams will give you a very limited picture of Islam as it is lived.

...

Most anthropologists do not make clear at all how extraordinarily artificial the pictures they draw of Islam and the life of Muslims are because of the limitations of where they do their fieldwork. So artificial indeed that I have on many occasions sat with my ethnographies of Islam and translated it into Arabic to small crowds in Iraq for most to eventually breakdown into fits of laughter. The comments I hear on many occasions tend to be: “They must think we are really stupid in the West.” (emphasis my own)

Race and Gender in Music

What is the boundary of a tradition or genre? Music grants creative license, and market forces are increasingly determining the success of musicians rather than politics expressed in the music. This creates problems such as cultural appropriation, and the clear solution is not yet to be found. Jazz started as a music genre that expressed black suffering and the African American experience. Nowadays it is often associated with upper-class taste and elevator music. Yet one also finds it hard to call for a purge in all elements that are inauthentic.
The politics of culture remains an important issue for the Indian diaspora in the Caribbeans, as Tejaswani Niranjana shows in her book Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. The diaspora faces the anxiety of trying to prove they are also adherents of “Indian culture,” which dangers on feeding into Orientalist interpretations of hierarchies of authenticity. Some migrants from India have treated caste as a personal ascription and adopted the styles of conduct to appear as a twice-born. Due to the disproportionate ratio of male to female migrants, caste endogamy to the extent of “back home” was almost impossible. This trend has led to people like controversial writer V.S. Naipaul to think of the diaspora in the Caribbean as “mimic men” and have not “produced anything.” Some of them have thus tried to show their continuance of (Hindu) tradition at home and racial similarity and create exclusionist cultural projects. The left in Trinidad thus faces problems of race, where colonialists and racial purists on both sides tried to maintain an antagonist position toward each other’s interests, despite working class similarities.

Derek Walcott responded in a momentous Nobel Prize speech that the Caribbean has always been looked in a way that it is "illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized." It stems from an expansionist idea that the Caribbeans across the ocean “is new, this is the frontier, the boundary of endeavor, and henceforth everything can only be mimicry.”[Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. 37.] Yet there is undue appreciation to the innovative uses of the mix in chutney-soca, with Trinidadian English as well as Bhojpuri Hindi being featured in explicit songs. In ways chutney-soca songs are more authentic, organic, and egalitarian than some other "traditional" Indian songs. As Walcott eloquently asked, why are these practices "not 'celebrations of a real presence'? Why should India be 'lost' when none of these villagers ever really knew it, and why not 'continuing'?"

Soca music events allows for many working class women to participate in festive cultural expression, even while incurring wrath from conservative commentators. There are many suggestive lyrics, such as those sung by the famous Drupatee, which have suffered the ignominy of vulgar or obscene. Others stated that "no Indian woman has any right to sing calypso."[Ibid. 112-3.] Racial purity, like caste purity, relies heavily on the circumscription of actions of a community’s women. Hindu opinions in Trinidad has are parallels with Confucian projects in China, such as the House of Female Virtue (女德馆) in which claims to tradition and cultural authenticity threaten female self-respect, freedom, and mobility. The question of gender is under-explored in the quest for authenticity. Trinidad provides a great ground for research since it carries many intersectional questions. Tejaswani Niranjana’s book is a great analysis for the politics of class, race and culture.

Fore more: see documentary on Calypso-Soca music, Jahaji Music