Post-reading notes: I, Tituba, Black Witch Of Salem

Tituba's influence on the white Christians in the book is really interesting. She uses "witchcraft" or voodoo to slowly and painfully kill one of them, a literal influence, which haunts her the rest of her life. However, her more subtle influence as a non-Puritan on the young girls who she encourages to break a few rules in their religion only to improve their health, has dire consequences for everyone but Tituba. When her suggestions proves successful, it seems the girls turn on her and accuse her of witchcraft but they also accuse everyone who is different or has inconvenienced them of the same thing and turn the whole town against each other. They seem more possessed by Satan than anyone else! So in reality, it seems the girls lost their faith. It's usually those who are most insecure who accuse others of insecurities, usually the same insecurities that they have, which here means feeling in scheme with the devil. It's interesting that for a Puritan, losing faith is suggested as being tantamount to switching to the devil's side but this may be because they see the devil in everything that isn't Puritan. Tituba, by the way, doesn't believe in either God or Satan.

I also thought that the discussions between Tituba, her mother, Mama Yaya, and Hester about gender are really interesting. Everyone else believes involvement with men brings nothing but misfortune to women, which in this novel is generally true, Tituba's life and the plot of the novel, is almost just a string of Tituba's romantic involvements and how they precipitate the events of her life and eventually lead to her hanging. Still, Tituba, who was conceived through rape, seeks involvement with men for the sexual comfort. Tituba is, above all else, a character who wants to trust people.

I like what this story and what Mama Yaya says about the struggle of slaves for freedom. That they are inclined to violent means to gain back the dignity taken from them with such violence. However, it is through Tituba's care for people, whether slave or master, which undoes society. If that isn't a huge shout out to MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, I've never heard one.

Finally, thinking about this book, maybe because it talks about a slave woman's influence on religion, I thought of Roots and I thought of how horrifying it must have been for a Muslim woman to be taken as a slave the way Europeans took the Africans as slaves. Yes, the there are slaves in the Quran but Muslims are urged to treat slaves with humility and promised rewards for freeing slaves. Not that I don't sympathize with enslaved males Muslims but Muslimah taken as a slave is the twisting of the knife in my belly.

Information Marxism

One of my interests is branding. Products are often sold with fine print that threatens to contractually bind us into expressing certain personalities, attitudes, or traits. This is why you can answer the question: what's the difference between someone who owns a Mac and someone who owns a PC?

The truth is, there doesn't have to be any difference. It's like asking what the difference is between someone who owns cows and someone who owns goats. Maybe somewhere there's stereotype, but it hasn't been used to sell anything, at least not successfully, so most of us can't answer this question. But the real answer is the same: there doesn't necessarily have to be a difference.

When materialism was synonymous with shopohilism, caring about brands made you a shallow person. These days, if you don't care about brands, you aren't socially conscious. However, caring is no longer superficial but requires a lot of research. In the information age, a lack of social consciousness makes you information impoverished, lazy, inept, inconsiderate, and/or awkward. Still, honestly, social consciousness is a "brand" itself, and I have mixed feelings about branding.

First, how much of our identity is created through what we purchase? Everything you buy says something about you because everything you buy is a vote and an investment in the retailer, company, and product and how you vote and invest reflects upon you. Beyond bare necessities, your choices reflect your values or the values a brand convinces you you should have. That last part is pivotal. Do your choices reflect your values or the values advertising convinces you to have?

This came into perspective for me as a minority. The values my parents have are not the same as those held by the larger society I live in. Furthermore, my parents are rather religious and have only become more so over the course of my life. Though their cultural values are still pretty deeply held, religion gives them a more canonized and therefore more accessible way to examine their values against a standard they trust. Their cultural values tend to be more arbitrary but because religion plays such a large cultural role in my family, I have overall adapted a stance of re-examination of values.

It's not just the private sector that perpetuates branding. Schools, which are government regulated, perpetuate the American brand. Or what officials have decided is the American brand. It could be said that's politics in general.

When I was writing graduate school applications, one of the best questions I came across about information access is Randy Stoecker's concern over whether internet access gives underprivileged, dispossessed people a superficial or false sense of belonging to larger culture. Implied in this criticism is a distrust for larger culture, which is created through assertive branding and seeks to profit only the business owners.

The best answer to this question, I believe, comes from Hans Enzensberger, on whom I haven't done enough research but first encountered here. I have been interested in "new media" since I encountered Amir Ahmad's Islam in the Age of New Media project. Basically, the idea is the mass, radical manipulation of media. Branding is created through media but everyone has access to the creation of media, it gives everyone access, if they wish, to branding as well. Rather than only consuming pre-packaged brand values, people are given the chance to package and perpetuate the values they choose. This is also, in my opinion, one of the best uses of the internet. Already, the internet is being limited by big brands. That can't be allowed to happen. Branding, especially in the realm of the internet, needs to be put into the hands of socially conscious community leaders. Maybe that sounds like tribalism but if we are to be united, it has to be on fair terms.

Listen up, mankind.

In feminism (if your eyes just glazed over, you are a chauvinist and you don't deserve to read what I have to say), a point that is often made to justify the discourse is that man is often equated with the universal standard, prototypical humanoid, which leaves women to be "other" because she is "not a man" and is therefore "deficient." Some claim that defining women this way is even tantamount to their non-existence.

That is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it as that using the word "man" to refers to all people is actually more harmful to men. How can you see yourself as an individual, rather than a generalization/stereotype if the word that refers to your group refers to all groups put together, as well? If everyone were divided into 1, 2, 3, and 4 and the set [1, 2, 3, 4] is called 1, it is problematic to state 2, 3, and 4 are not represented in the group's name yet fail to recognize that 1 has lost it's identity to that of the group. In this alternative way of thinking, women are both included and distinguished within the group whereas as men are inclusive and undistinguished. What can be perceived as the dominance of men can also be perceived as a hindrance to the perception of individuality just as easily as the projection of any other stereotype or bias.

I think the problem posed here is more of a problem with a desire to be indistinguishable, a mere face in the crowd. Any feminist can agree that different is not the same as deficient, so how is that leap in reasoning made? Historically, there unfortunately seems to be an answer to that question, but logically, I don't think there is. Women don't want to be treated differently than men even though they are different and men are different from them, too. And there are people who are more different or different in other ways. And I'm not just talking about sex and gender. But no, different is bad. Let's all be the same. Let's all be like heterosexual men. Commercialized identity, ftw!

But with more college educated folks who know it's wrong to think different is bad, it's cool to be different. But the problem is, most college educated folks aren't "different." They're normal and the more "normal" you are, the harder you have to try to be "different." The better you fit into the dominant culture, the more likely it is that you are impossibly indistinguishable, the more likely it is that you cultivate eccentric, local, obscure, and even distasteful tastes and habits and pointedly disregard anything adopted by "the masses." If the masses do it, they will only do it ironically. This is the result of claiming reclamation for distinctiveness that is mistaken for being downtrodden and denying it to what could be viewed as privilege but turns out not to be so. I'm not saying feminism is at fault. But it is certainly exemplary, particularly in its "western" form, in contributing to the problem.

The New Old Me

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”- TS Elliot.

In high school, I was exposed to this quote in a science class, and in that context, I interpreted it in terms of scientific exploration for the purpose of learning more about the human condition. Basically, I took it to mean that you cannot know yourself unless you know the world you live in.

With a bachelor's degree in English, I can think of at least 5 other ways to interpret this quote. Now, sitting in my high school bedroom, with a bachelor's degree in English, one of the interpretations is particularly compelling because it explains why my entire college career felt like an existential crisis.

When my mother explains my initial college dropout to her friends, she explains that Geneseo is too far away, so I couldn't endure the transition. Believing she meant I was overcome with homesickness, I disavowed her explanation, knowing there was more to it than the distance. And besides, that made me sound like a wimp. More specifically, it made me sound like the stereotypical, domestically inclined, Bengali, Muslim woman the American feminist in me adamantly resisted. Though breaking that stereotype is important to me, my resistance was not just a matter of principle. I knew that in America, the woman I aspired to be required not just competence but prowess outside the confines of domesticity.

When I graduated high school, I was confident I could achieve my desired manner of prowess. In high school I was widely known and well liked (enough to be voted class president) despite being pretty nerdy and definitely not classically popular. I was perfectly happy with the place I had cultivated for myself and  believed it could be replicated in the world at large.

However, in my belief, I failed to take into account the reality of my situation. In high school, when I wasn't in school, I was always home or with my family. For me, unmonitored outside world interactions were limited to school hours and school activities, limited internet, books, TV and a handful of birthday parties my parents reluctantly gave me permission to attend. I was actually jealous when my peers started working because I felt even further behind in "real" life experience. I worked to gain experience by joining as many after school activities I could possibly interest myself in. Unfortunately, my opposition gave me a false sense of accomplishment and lead me deny my home life as a major element of my identity. It wasn't until I lived away from my family again that I understood the extent of my social impediments or their consequences.

Sitting in my room today, I am not nearly as inclined to escape it as I one was. This is not because I've become complacent. Just moments ago, I realized my college years were spent in frustration and self-hatred because, after my initial failure, I was forced out of any notions of worldly experience. This lead me to question the viability of my identity and aspirations outside the sequestered world of my high school years, since they had been conceived within it. Could I still be who I happily was and follow my dreams? Or did I have to be whoever I had to be and do whatever I had to do to survive in the "real world"? Unschooled in the former and afraid of the latter, I avoided answering questions I could barely formulate and lost myself in the world I had once myopically believed to be my own.

In the world beyond my parents' house, I have learned a lot. As a teenager, I invested a lot of emotional and  ideological energy against my confinement, not just to break a stereotype but again, because I didn't want to be a confined woman. That sense of rebellion became as much a part of me but so did my confinement. However, because I was in denial that my confinement defined me, I could hardly lay claim to my rebellion against it. Out in the wider world, I had to face the harsh reality that my confinement had defined me to a point of stultification in a world without forced restraints. Struggling against the identity formed in my sequestered upbringing, however, increasingly distanced me from the positive outcomes born from my confinement--my desire to grow, my sense of purpose, and my motivation.

I have to accept that, no matter what happens, a part of me will always be a girl who lived a sheltered life.

Curation and Cultivation

Since finishing college, maybe even since I began living away from my family, I have begun to realize that the way most people define themselves is in relation to a given set of rules. Some people follow rules provided to them and identify themselves as followers of those rules. Some people defy rules that are provided to them and consider themselves to be rebels, often also identifying themselves with the reasons that they need not follow those rules. A lot of times, people hop between different sets of rules, looking for a set they like. Even more often, people take their given set of rules and modify them to suite their lifestyle.

However, because people use rules as a basis for their identities, they tend to take it personally when others defy, reject, modify, or even follow the same rules as they do. To take a lesson from Huck Finn, rules also have an intimate relationship with morality and justice. On top of which righteousness often involves choosing between following rules that can mean saving yourself and sacrificing others or saving others and sacrificing yourself where "self" is interchangeable with rules and identity and mired in the realm of choice.

Even the way we learn and know can be boiled down to understanding, accepting, and following rules.

Since I was a kid, I have always had a problem with rules. They are what I consider to be a narrow minded way of being. As a daughter of immigrant parents, it often seemed to me that neither my school nor my parents, the two institutions under which I had to operate quite knew what rules really made sense to enforce upon me. My mother thought this was because my grandfather had spoiled me as a child and lead me to believe I was too good for rules, which is probably partially true.

From a young age, I have been choosing when I wanted to follow whatever rules suited my interests. I kept my enemy close when it came to school, by getting such spectacular grades that the teachers just assumed I was a stickler for the rules and neglected to enforce them for me, eventually deeming me an exception-- which I was. Unfortunately, my mother saw me for what I was and defying her over-protective rules required covert operations.

For me, defying rules has never been action based in carelessness or recklessness. In a true mastery of defiance, getting caught should be an act of defiance itself. Or is it an act of identity, identifying the perpetrator simply as a rebel? But I am not happy with being someone who is just "against" some other thing. I crave to learn, not destroy.  

As someone who has never followed rules indiscriminately, I struggled in college-- navigating disciplines and bureaucracies. And even more so, I struggled with the freedom to choose and make my own life, freedom I have only gained from leaving my parents' home and from finishing school with zero job prospects. However, I refused to follow any beaten trail guaranteeing success.

Obviously, I have no choice but to make my own rules-- rules I will myself to follow in a lifelong test of my own capacity for learning, adapting, and perhaps teaching others to do the same. I seek not only to know but understand knowing and to pass on that understanding and pass on my refusal to tailor myself to any principles but my own. This is what I do best. Having nothing else to base my principles on, I will have to base them on the curation and cultivation of my interests. Having no platform for the performance of my self-discipline, I begin this blog as a promise to myself and will continue it until my private performance is either satisfactory or preferred.