Essay: Because we live in this world and no other

When was the last time you read a story that well and truly blew your mind?

I suppose, in order to answer that question, you’d have to first consider what it means to have your mind blown? To me, it means coming upon a story that makes me reconsider the very foundations of society, and which challenges my assumptions about what it means to be human.

Because we live in a human body, and because we can see it, smell it, inhabit it and drink of it, we imagine that we know it. We certainly fall into the trap of thinking that we know what human culture is (or what it ought to be) because that’s how we already live, and we’d like to keep it this way. At most, we might need to stretch the frontiers of what we can achieve, how far we can travel, and the limitations of our bodies. That’s the kind of science, and also the kind of fantasy, we like to conjure up. But every once in a while, along comes a story that shakes our self-assurance, and forces us to reconsider humanity...

Read the full essay in Outlook magazine: https://www.outlookindia.com/books/because-we-live-in-this-world-and-no-other

Essay: White sheets and white lies

Imagine then, my perplexity when I found myself trudging from hotel to hotel, baggage in tow, and my friend refusing to check in anywhere. The rooms looked fine to me, the hotels reasonably secure. What could be the matter? At the third hotel, my friend finally explained: she refused to stay at any hotel that didn’t have white sheets.

White bed linen. White towels. White robes. Code for luxury. All five-star hotels have them, and most four-star and three-starred hotels too, since they model themselves on the five-starred ones. But oh! The quiet boredom of five-star décor! Over the years, I have also written a few stories for travel magazines, which involved staying at five-star hotels with the implicit understanding between the editors and the hotels (who were also advertisers for the magazines) that the article should subtly nudge the reader towards the joys that were on offer. For a writer like me, this is a hard ask. Part of the problem is that I don’t like to do as I’m told, but even when I am willing, there’s the additional problem of not having much to write about. Every fancy hotel is more or less like another fancy hotel. They celebrate this monotony by putting out advertising jargon that describes the experience of staying at such hotels as ‘home’.

Now, my home is nothing like a fancy hotel. For starters, my sheets aren’t white...

Read the full essay in Frontline: https://frontline.thehindu.com/other/travel/luxury-hotels-white-sheets-class-illusion/article70486103.ece

Surma eyes and how we're taught to see

Extract from a new essay on representation of Muslims (Muslim men in particular) in Hindi movies:

 
In and of itself, the Muslim-as-terrorist trope would be less damaging were it not for a quiet lie surrounding these narratives. The lie is that only Muslims are responsible for terrorism, that Muslim trauma is dangerous only because it leads to radicalisation. In real life, this falsehood is generated by politicians who have a monopoly over the terror discourse: who experiences it, who gets tainted by it, who gets off scot-free?...

In a country like India, complexity of representation is a big ask at the best of times. Most communities have been stereotyped in Hindi movies, including people from Hindi-speaking regions – the paanwala, the gun-toting gangster, the dacoit, the princeling or nawab, the jolly Sikh, and so on. In fact, most communities have not been represented at all. There are over 3,000 castes, more than 700 tribes, and each religion also has distinct sects, each with their own culture. A Bohra Muslim woman, for instances, looks nothing like an Ismaili, and a Kashmiri Muslim is different even from a Ladakhi Muslim. Their problems, like those of any film protagonist, are simultaneously unique and universal, and they deserve to be treated as such, for we cannot separate the invisibilisation of a community from their sociopolitical marginalisation.

Read the full essay in Frontline magazine: 

https://frontline.thehindu.com/arts-and-culture/cinema/bollywood-muslims-terror-tropes-islamophobia-cinema/article70432997.ece

Against the Calculus of Skin

I have a new essay in Ananke magazine's 10th anniversary special edition. My essay is titled 'Against the Calculus of Skin'. I was thinking of how much of a woman's existence is defined by her body - how much skin is (in)visible, and how cultural notions of attractive/acceptable intersect with politics in our times. A brief extract from it, here: 

I am tired of skin. I am tired of the way women’s skin seem to swallow up their kidneys, aortas, phalanges. For all the space taken up by skin in public discourse, it is almost as if these other bits of us had nothing to do with us being women.

Skin. The largest and most vulnerable organ in the body. It protects us with no protection of its own. At one time in history, humans began to cover up skin with more layers. Some scientists suggest it was during the first iceage, 180,000 years ago. Clothing brought us protection from cold, but also sun and rain, from insect bites and bruising gravel. Men needed it as much as women did. But ever since people began to read gendered meanings into clothing, it has begun to mess with our sense of justice. We make assumptions about how others, especially women, deserve to be treated based on what part of her skin can be espied – how low a saree hangs on her hips, how high the skirt, whether or not her ears and neck are covered – at what time of day. And while I am tired of men who look at a woman’s knees and jump to the conclusion that she desires sexual congress, I am thoroughly sick of women who look at another woman in a bikini and call her a prostitute.

Those who say such things surely know in their hearts that they’re wrong. They say those things anyway because, if a woman is neither within grasp nor concerned about how she’s viewed, they feel compelled to punish her. Some punish with rape, others by perpetuating a moral binary whereby women are split into whore/saint. And I am very, very tired of women rationing out their allyship based on skin so that some of us are cast to the wolves of harassment and bigotry.

Reader, I say, ‘we’, although I want to exclude myself from this reckoning. Still, I say ‘we’ because so many women fall prey to one form of categorical splitting or the other. If it’s not the whore/saint binary, it’s the oppressed/liberated one. Can white women in France or Denmark possibly believe that a woman who refuses to show her face does not deserve to eat? Do Indian women across the spectrum of religious affiliation (or even atheists) truly think that a woman who keeps her neck and chest covered, cannot achieve financial autonomy? Are you that brown woman who refuses to accept that there might be a kind of freedom in not showing off your legs or your cleavage in a culture that demands it of you? Do you sit around calculating how much of an education, what jobs, how much of a political voice should be allowed to a woman based on what percentage of her skin is visible? Hands and arms, elbow down, okay? Ankles, okay? Shoulders, great? Waist, mandatory reveal?

I am sick of this calculus. The expectation of majoritarian assimilation often masks a wilful blindness towards the human struggle to balance individual circumstance and choice against cultural norms, and nowhere is this blindness more insistently inscribed than upon the skins of women. Yet, the meanings we attach to women’s decisions to clothe themselves in particular ways almost always turn out to be wrong if only we would bother to look closer. An image that brought me up short recently was a representation of St Hild of Whitby in the Durham Cathedral. At first glance, I thought it was it a painting of an Iranian or South Asian woman in a chador. Indeed, but for the saint’s name written on the painting, anyone would have thought so. I found myself wondering how people might be impacted by the painting with or without the name. How does our response change, knowing that it is not a present-day Muslim woman, but a medieval Christian saint who dressed that way? Would the average white woman looking at that painting think of St Hild as oppressed or subservient to any mortal man? 

You can read the whole issue here: https://issuu.com/anankemag/docs/ananke_10th_29_

Against the Death of Dream (in Wasafiri, 40th anniversary issue, Autumn 2024)

I've written my first essay for the lastest issue of Wasafiri, themed Futurisms. Here's a very short extract from my essay, Against the Death of Dream: 

One of the most dangerous things, Pash warned, is the clock that moves on your wrist but not in your eyes. For years I wondered at this image of a stopped clock in the reader’s eye, and the way the poet juxtaposes frozen time against water frozen inside eyes. (Sabse khatarnaak vo aankh hoti hai/jo sab dekhti hui bhi jami barf hoti hai). If to dream is to have a vision for the future, then the death of dream is to accept that the present moment is all of time, and that we must lose all hope for a safer, more loving, more leisurely time. Read in this light, I would argue that the danger is not restricted only to the loss of hopeful dreams; it is just as dangerous to lose our nightmares.

In Radical Hope, philosopher-psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes that anxiety can be a realistic response to the world, which suggests that anxiety-induced dreams serve to alert us to individual and collective threats. If we know how to ‘read’ our nightmares, we may find that they serve as timely warnings. In my own experience, I find nightmares to be a useful aid in reconnecting with my instinctive ‘self’. Last year, I had woken up from a miserable dream...

Please read the rest of the essay in the lastest issue of Wasafiri (119, 40th anniversary issue, Autumn 2024).

Annie Zaidi