Beauty is a Well-Organized Mind

Brown lady at the counter: you are so pretty! you look like a picture.
White lady nearby: you are. I'm thinking national geographic. 
Brown lady: no, I mean by any standard.

THANK YOU.

I have a vendetta against the idea of"national geographic" aka "exotic" prettiness. Well meaning people, don't make me make you feel awkward by attempting to compliment me with this idea. That the mere paradigm shift of finding beauty in someone without apparently nordic ancestry can be considered worldly, adventurous, cool, rebellious taste makes the rest of white people seem unfairly stuffy. Not to mention that I resent my image being used as a marker of taste, cool or otherwise. That my image can only be beautiful in a way that serves the viewer either objectifies me or suggests a wishful master-slave mindset, which can be synonymous. And since I am neither an object nor a slave probably means the viewer resents me for being who I am where I am. In other words, people who think I'm exotic think I don't belong.

Unless they think that the state of not being in one's native place, being unusually juxtaposed with one's background, is beautiful. In which case, I'm still offended because a brown person among white people is out of place but a white person among brown people is usually construed as worldly, adventurous, cool, rebellious and all you've done is ghettoize me.

I don't really agree with the brown lady's beauty standards either but at least her compliment was really a compliment and not backhanded white supremacy. She proved that by following her compliment up with defending me.

So, what beauty standards do I endorse? That would be inner beauty. What's inner beauty? I'm gonna go with my mom and with Dumbledore and say that inner beauty, which I'm going to say is also eternal beauty, is a well-organized mind. Given my tendency to talk about religion, anti-rationalism, and social justice, maybe you expected this to be focused on the heart. Anyone who gets a Dumbledore citation, though, might guess that your heart should help you organize your mind. I think my heart is where my inner child lives and though I will never shut her out, she is reactionary, fickle and all ego and as an adult, it would be blind or lazy of me to not have learned better about some things.

As I tried to say from the beginning, though I'm not sure I said it the same way, this blog has been mostly about figuring out my organizing principles. I think I like this way of saying it better.

Harem Pants: Yes or No?

I am conflicted about harem pants.

On one hand, I've owned "harem pants" for as long as I've lived. Only, I call them salwars and always wear them with a long tunic called a kameez in a traditional South Asian outfit. As modestly flattering and comfortable as I think they are, I only ever wore them that way as pajamas and thought of bedtime as Hammertime. According to Wikipedia, even Hammer pants take inspiration from "harem pants." Had it been socially acceptable for me to wear salwars without invoking images of genies, belly dancers, and MC Hammer (we'll talk some other time about why Hammer was rocking them) to white people and looking like I was fresh off the boat to brown people (dude, what's wrong with being new here?), I would have totally rocked them. Now that harem pants are trendy, I can do that without worry, right?

Wrong. The thing is, it's socially acceptable for fashionistas and hipsters so everywhere outside of a big city, I will still invoke those same images, especially since I don't want to come off as either a fashionista or a hipster. I regret not wearing salwars in high school, where I knew practically everyone. I don't think it would've come off as a failure to assimilate, as I was afraid it would, but, given my honors class taking bookworm reputation, as an experiment of a quirky, budding intellectual (I flatter myself). These days, people will initially perceive a fashion zombie tendency and/or a failure to assimilate, giving them options to choose from for steering clear of me. Eventually, if they still decide to give me a chance, the quirky (still budding) intellectual will shine through.

But then there's the fact that I think the social acceptability of harem pants is a racist turn of culture, which is sadly often the case when it comes to the appropriation of subaltern peoples' culture. The term invokes a cultural monolith, spanning from the Middle East out to South Asia. The harem, a Turkish social construction, did not exist in India, where the style originates. Therefore, the term implies that the entire region that was once the Islamic empire had a homogenous culture, which was untrue then and remains as greatly untrue today. Even sadder still, people consume racist culture without even realizing it's racist.

By the way, America, please don't wear harem pants if you protest against the lack of women's rights in the Middle East. I know you just want to look worldly and exotic despite your overwhelming whiteness, which means you already look ignorant, but it also looks like you're rubbing your supposed freedom from the harem in the faces of people you fancy being stuck in them.


So, if I, a brown girl who is often a hijabi these days, wears "harem pants," will it challenge or confirm the rampant stereotypes? First of all, I would call them salwars and correct anyone who referred to them otherwise. Maybe I just need a pair with "SALWAR" stamped on the ass. Yes.

"Weeds Vs. Sidewalk"

In our garden, we grow weeds
in a cracked tub my parents keep by the sidewalk.

We chanced upon these weeds one spring, the ground so swampy,
the earthworms had beached themselves on the sidewalk.

My parents were so happy, in disbelief, collecting a prized Bangladeshi plant
from soil along American sidewalk!

I was young and imagined Bangladeshis as fourth friends,
braving puddles, just off the edge of the sidewalk,
Who followed me home, me alone,
only to sit in silence among the weeds.

Shades of Grey and Brown

Fifty Shades of Grey recently hit the library bookshelves. I've had some interesting conversations with housewives and overheard interesting conversations among the ladies in the office. They're more or less unabashed, although I didn't spot anyone talking about it with or around too many men. It basically reminds me of the scene in Madmen when the ladies pass around a copy of Lady Chatterley. I don't think it's anything all that new and I don't think I'll be reading it, either.

But something good has come out of this for me, nonetheless. While trying to explain why I would not be reading it to a fellow lover of literature, I said that, right now, there are other ways that I'm more interested in developing my imagination.

And then it hit me. Ever since I was in the middle of my B.A., I have been conflicted about what I should be reading. I wasn't even sure what I wanted to read. There were a lot of people telling me what I, as a student of literature, should read. On the grounds of studying literature and yet studying post-colonial literature, which is anti-literature, in the classical sense, as much as movements in modernism are, and yet feeling as though there was something missing, all I knew was the my love for reading was in shambles and if it were to die, a part of me I loved would die with it. But the question I needed to ask myself was: What part of my imagination do I need/want to develop?

When I was in middle school, a well-meaning school librarian suggested I read a fiction book by a Muslim author with Muslim characters in a Muslim country. I don't even remember what book. Flustered, I told her I didn't want to. Between Harry Potter books, I was more interested in the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. I was interested in anything written by Avi or Rodman Philbrick. I remember liking a series of fairy tales re-written as novels from the point of view of a different character. Growing up sheltered, I wanted to know about the culture beyond my house, a culture I desperately wanted to take part in or at least relate to.

Even then, I knew I wasn't interested in mainstream culture-- I was self-aware enough to know I was different and geeky and be able to appreciate that about myself. But I remember being afraid of being shaped wrongly by the book she suggested. I was afraid it would change me in a way I had no control over. I was afraid it would hit uncomfortably close to home. I was also afraid it would miss and make me feel too different, an unreachable other. Even as I started reading global, post-colonial literature in college, I was a apprehensive about reading anything by Indian, Bengali, or Muslim writers.

As I became more exposed to writing closer to my experience, started reading and enjoying a few books, even becoming overwhelmed by volume of literature I could still read about it, it became less important for me to be able to completely relate to a work by a Muslim or from a Muslim country. It made me realize that there were a lot of people like me, but not exactly like me and that this is a good thing. Even though there's still a part of me that's afraid that if I read one more book about being from the Indian subcontinent, being an immigrant, being Muslim, on top of which, being feminist, I'm going to alienate myself, now I think that it's something I need to develop more of an imagination for.

In a way, this focus it does limit me. I don't read very much mainstream literature and I'm not that interested in much of the literary canon and because of these reasons, it's not enough for me to meet someone who loves to read to feel an immediate connection with them-- like it was in middle school. But I do still connect with people who love literary fiction of most varieties. I also recently discovered my love for sci-fi. The biggest difference is that I now relate most to people developing shades of grey within their imagination of Muslim, immigrant, female, religious, subcontinental experiences because as someone of these experiences and an American on top of that, to do otherwise would require me to believe these descriptors are limits upon myself and believe they should be for other people, too.

Brown Girl In Bright Colors

The other day I was extremely frustrated with studying for the GRE and I drew this picture. It made me feel 1000 percent better than I felt before I started. I drew it off a picture Will took of me at Montauk in Spring 2009. It was done in paintbrush, freeware that is about equivalent to Microsoft Paint, using the pen and paint bucket tools.

I really like how this turned out. In some ways, it reminds me of comic book drawing. The colors, the lack of texture in the hair. I also like how the use of different colors instead of gradations of one color turned out. The face appears three dimensional despite color variation being replaced by light variation and a lack of other indications of depth. The light pattern is maintained, and that is enough to maintain the illusion of 3D. Although, I did use brighter colors for brighter areas, generally.

I also like that it looks kind of ugly at first glance. Almost witch-like with all the green in the skin. But some people do have greens in their skin color and it's beautiful. 

Beauty Standards: Elitism and Skin Color

Since I was young, my mother compared my complexion to that of my paler sister and warned me not to get too much sun exposure. She made it a given that lighter skin was beautiful. Though I argued that tans fade, she said sun destroys the skin, so lighter skin became more than a beauty standard, it became a marker of an appreciation of beauty as well. She even mused over whether, among my white friends, my darker skin would lead to my being overlooked. I don't really blame my mom and her views didn't stop me from loving the warm sun on my skin or laughing when my white friends complained that I made them look ghostly pale, but I was surprised to learn that it has become a trend among paler South Asian girls to go tanning.

To provide contrast, I had an experience recently in the "ethnic hair section" at the store, where surprised to find skin lightening products alongside the olive oil shampoo I'd gone there to find. It's not surprising that skin lightening products exist. Fair and Lovely, an ayurvedic "treatment" for dark or uneven skin tone is big in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. I have heard horror stories of women who used more aggressive means to lighten their skin. My surprise came from my unawareness of the extent to which the standard of whiteness as beauty is prevalent in black culture.

From what I understand, in most cultures, the beauty that is associated with paleness is as an elitist beauty standard. Women of higher classes maintained their prized paleness as a mark of the privilege of not having to work or even go outside if they so chose.

In American slavery, lighter skin color lead to household jobs rather than fieldwork. If a black woman was light enough, depending on where she was, her freedom might even be purchased by a doting white man. Across the board, the illegitimate children of white masters and their black slaves, tended to receive better treatment, as though the whiteness of their philandering fathers made their blackness somewhat forgivable. Again, lightness was an elitist standard enforced though the system of slavery by those in power. It can even be argued that the elitism of skin pigmentation lead to the enslavement of Africans, whose darker skin color made it seem like they were made for manual labor.

Later, the tan was adopted by Europeans and Americans as a mark of imperial life, exotic vacations, and leisurely sun bathing. Though it was a more accessible standard of beauty, the favorable tan did not come from fieldwork, which is still derisively called a farmer's tan or being a redneck. Since fieldwork had largely been replaced by office work, the tan indicated the privilege of relaxation that separated white collar work from blue collar work.

In Islam, though elitism often goes unacknowledged in its perpetuation, there is a prevalent interpretation suggesting that beauty is equivalent with whiteness. In Qur'an and Woman, by Amina Wadud, Dr. Wadud explains the highest beauty is that of a face aglow with the "noor," which means light, of angelic faith. Another contribution to this beauty standard comes from that of the ethereal houri, creatures of heaven who are described as being beyond human in height, having transparent, glowing skin, and virginal bodies that do not age. Both the concept of "noor" and the houri in beauty standards have lead to beauty standards akin with white beauty standards, which Dr. Wadud dismisses due to its inconsideration for black beauty. 

Now with all this in consideration, going back to the tanning of pale South Asian girls, I am interested in where their motivation to do so is from. I have also seen black women obviously tanning themselves at the beach. Though I don't think it comes from an urge to uphold my mother's beauty standards, I am inclined to be critical of this practice. At first, I thought it might be a defiance of the beauty standard that is still prevalent in Bollywood. However, other enduring standards are those of elitism and western luxury, the later of which is especially endorsed by western residing and western educated South Asians.

In India, there is fierce enmity between the wealthy who uphold Bollywood standards and those who uphold western standards. In America, there is similar dissent between wealthy blacks who emulate old money standards and those who choose the flashy expression of new money. Though I'm not sure under which standard black tanners associate themselves, but South Asians in America likely propagate western standards of luxury. Either way, tanning is probably an expression of elitist standards that is definitely laced, ironically, with white/western beauty standards.

Long before I stopped being relieved when my sports tan finally faded and learned to enjoy the color of my skin, I felt slighted by the existence of standards of color and knew that no one should judge others or even themselves by a standard so superficial. Of course, the standard is not superficial in that it's steeped in elitism.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop enjoying the sun. There is work being to done to prevent what has been called "shadeism." I think my views fall more toward the prevention of children growing up with so much stock in any standards of beauty at all. Sure, the pursuit of such standards, if successful, lead to confidence in one's image. But what people don't realize is that it's the confidence that's beautiful, not the image. So, since I'm not one for the abolition of all standards, rather than the pursuit of beauty standards, which seem rather insecure in their exclusivity alone, how about something more positive that anyone willing can achieve, something that understands difference and can't be evaluated with so little regard? What that might be is probably best left for you to decide.

Grapefruit

At first, I thought I was about to gain some street cred for my love of grapefruit soda. Instead, I found out 50 cent made the same mistake as my dad did when my dad was fresh off the boat. Hilarious. Ansari is awesome.