Ten Thousand Miles

Meditative Textuality

Is there such a thing as mindful reading and mindful writing? One answer to this question examines the experience of "contemplative reading," which is a kind of literature that invites a particular spiritual or reflective approach. Religious texts are often placed into this category, along with personal essays, spiritual tracts, and lyric poems. Contemplative reading is often presented as a combination of a particular kind of writing and a particular kind of reading: writing that reflects on "big questions," and reading that puts down the critical/analytical lens in favor of softer forms of attention. There's much I like about this approach -- it reminds me a bit of my impassioned professor of psychology who taught a course on spiritual autobiographies. I remember him standing in the big lecture room of Linsley-Chittenden, where we all sat in those old scratched wooden seats where generations of students had carved their names, and waving around a copy of Gandhi's autobiography. "In most of your courses, you will be asked to read books like this," he said, holding the book out at arm's length. "In this class, I want you to read them like this." He hugged the book close to his heart. At the end of the course, we wrote our own spiritual autobiographies.

I loved this course, and the passionate form of contemplative reading it inspired, yet I'm also leery of many of the possible assumptions behind this particular mode. In reading meditatively or mindfully, is it really necessary for us to stop asking crucial critical questions, especially questions about the social and material reasons why we can read these texts in the first place? Many scholars who defend studying and teaching contemplative reading are doing so as a reaction against what they see as the relentlessly negative spirit of scholarly inquiry. I would like to develop a way for us to hold competing ideas in the mind at once: to read, for example, to the ways in which it changes our attention, our breath, our approach to other people, while at the same time to read with a consciousness of the social politics of such reading. In short, I wouldn't want meditative textuality to be an escape from thinking about the unpleasant or uncomfortable aspects of our globalized lives, but instead a point of deeping our attention to precisely these points of pain and pressure.

Mindful Reading

What are the links between meditation and literature? I've been prompted to think about this through Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace, a mixed cycle of fiction and nonfiction that deals with the power of narrative to enact reconciliation and healing in the aftermath of mass violence. One part of Kingston's book recounts her time setting up community writing groups for veterans of the Vietnam War. She organizes these writing sessions around Buddhist-inspired practices of meditation: participants breathe together, or engage in walking meditation, before and as part of their writing practice.

I've been interested in meditation ever since high school, when my history teacher would organize meditation workshops for students. We inhaled incense-scented air in the school dance studio, sat quietly while counting up and back to ten, and flapped our wings like chickens while breathing in and out as fast as we could. I loved all of this, including the chicken meditation, but I always saw it as the absolute antithesis of writing. Meditation workshops were places where I stopped endlessly narrating my world; they were places where life didn't have to be so relentlessly verbal.

So when I first encountered a meditative approach to literature, I was both compelled and puzzled. I met Kingston as a university student at a master's tea at Yale in 1993, where she talked to a packed room of students about her work with Vietnam veterans. I remember vividly asking her how she reconciled these two activities. What did she say? I've totally forgotten.

This forgetting, however, is probably for the best. It's given me an opportunity to think again in an open way about the way in which mindfulness practices, of which meditation is perhaps the clearest example, might not be in opposition to language and literature. I've been intrigued to find out that the history of meditation, in both Western and Asian traditions, is capacious enough to encompass an intimate relation with textuality. Medieval Western reading practices were often seen as forms of meditation, where one focused on a particular text to gain new insights into life and the divine. Thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist philosophers saw meditation as perfectly compatible with thought: as a different approach to thought rather than its antithesis.

I'm interested, thus, in theorizing what it might mean to write and read in a modern meditative way, and what that experience of language might contribute to big questions about the search for reconciliation in the wake of mass violence. I'm also interested in the global, layered history of meditative reading as a transnational practice: how the material histories of learning to write and read in this way might be shaped by the histories of foreign wars, migration, and dislocation as much as by any idealized spiritual transmission from guru to disciple. In the next few weeks, I'll be trying to think through these questions to see what meditative literature can be said to be, and what it might offer us, in times of need.

 

Reading and Responsibility

Why is it exactly that we might feel responsible to people we've never met? I've been thinking about the relationship between literature and responsibility lately, since in many ways literature, and the novel in particular, has been seen as a genre that does exactly that. Historians have long argued that the novel was one technology that helped people develop a sense of responsibility to fellow national citizens; some now see it as a tool to help reading publics develop a sense of cosmopolitan obligation. Of course, the problem with making this kind of claim is that it's often difficult to verify in empirical terms. I think it's certainly very fair to argue that the novel invited all of these new forms of responsibility, but given what we know about how people actually read, it's not as easy to document how reading actually changes people's sense of community. While I would like to believe the most optimistic accounts of literature's power to expand our ideas of social responsibility (advocated by people like Martha Nussbaum), I've been most persuaded by those who have made much more modest claims. Suzanne Keen, for instance, in her fascinating work on this subject, has turned to psychological studies to show that expansive claims for literature's pro-social dimension are usually not supported by empirical work. Her research invites us to look in much greater detail at specific conditions of reading -- in a classroom, in a book club, in one's bedroom -- to ask how all of these factors shape the power of literature to influence ideas of responsibility. Rather than saying literature always makes us more responsible, or that it does no such thing, Keen's work challenges us to find out under what conditions literature might actually do this kind of thing.

Intermarriage Blogs

I've been quite amazed these days at the number of interracial relationship blogs that are out there in cyberspace. I'm partly struck by our confessional culture, where so many people feel quite comfortable sharing their intimate lives with the global public, but also by the new ways in which families are really starting to develop new forms of community around the idea of mixed-race families. The histories of interracial romance are long, yet the politics of interracial families have been so fraught: frequently invisible to the eye of the state, criminalized through the law, or rendered impossible by ideas of what was considered "proper."

It amazes me that, when my parents married in 1970, interracial marriage had only been fully legal across the United States for three years. While not every state prohibited interracial marriage for every possible combination of races, it wasn't considered unconstitutional until the aptly-named landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving vs Virginia. I've also learned, to my shock but not really to my suprise, that my home state of South Carolina was one of the very last states to have prohibitions on interracial marriage on its books as recently as 1998, followed only by Alabama, which had one until 2000. These bans were legally unenforceable after 1967, but the fact that they lived on as a residual trace for more than thirty years is a grim testament to the history of American anti-miscegenation law.

Today, intermarriages are not only on the rise; they're also developing a much bigger presence within national and international imaginaries. These sites have names like "Gori Girl," "My Chinese Wife," "I Married an Alien," or "Indian Ties: East Marries West," and they range in tone from compilations of sociological statistics to intimate journals of intercultural bonds. Some of these sites have a distinct exoticizing flair to them, while others are actively interested in restoring a sense of the mundane to the cultural perception of interracial romance. Interracial relationships have often been considered in hypersexual terms (in this sense, they're not unlike the image of gay marriage); many of these sites are invested in shedding the Madame Butterfly narrative of hopeless romance and instead want to focus attention on the comedies and tragedies of a more prosaic kind. Some are explictly written as entertainment columns; others aim to serve as support groups for foreign spouses; others are self-help projects where blogging is a tool to actively improving the status of the relationship. And the ones I've mentioned here are only the tip of the iceberg; Indian Ties, for example, links to sixty other "intercultural relationship blogs with a South Asian twist."

I wonder how the rise of digital media is changing the way in which we read the genre of the memoir: if we'll see more and more memoirs that originated as blogs, or if the very form of how a life is shaped will be altered by the emerging and changing literary conventions of the blog. In some ways it's hard not to be reminded of the way in which reading happened in earlier periods, as when long novels would appear bit by bit in weekly publications. I'm curious to think more about how modern, futuristic forms of communication are also, in many ways, taking us back into practices of reading that we thought we'd forgotten.

The "I Married an Asian" Genre

My friend and great Asian Americanist scholar Tim Yu recently noted the rise of the "I Married an Asian" memoir, pointing to a few new books that have just come out in this vein. One is Ben Ryder Howe's My Korean Deli; another is Diane Farr's Kissing Outside the Lines.

I'm curious to read these in light of Robbie Clipper Sethi's The Bride Wore Red, which was published fifteen years ago, to see what has changed (or not changed) in the conventions of writing about interracial marriage.

I grew up in the American South in the 1980s in a mixed family with a white American father and an Indian mother, and it's a bit of an understatement to say that this was not a common arrangement in South Carolina. Growing up, I knew about three other kids of South Asian descent, and it wasn't until I went to college that I met other people from families like mine. I remember sitting on someone's battered sofa at a party at Yale, wearing a little black dress and an oversized motorcycle jacket, looking quizzically at a young man who was, like me, of white and Indian parentage. It was an uncanny moment, as if I were looking into an alternate universe of what I might have looked like if I'd been male, or if I'd had a brother. Since I don't look identifiably South Asian to most people, I wasn't really treated as "other" growing up to the same degree as many other multiracial people, but I was used to thinking of myself as a little different. The idea that there might be others out there with my kind of background was a novelty to be savored.

Now, of course, lots of my cousins' and friends' kids share my ethnicity, which seems more and more common every day. While some say that Indians in the US are statistically unlikely to marry outside their ethnic group, the "n sample" of my acquaintances tells a different story. And that's not even to include all the other white/Asian pairings among my friends, which are so common as to not really surprise anyone.

Interracial marriages in the US are often talked about through the language of assimilation, and as Susan Koshy writes about in her fascinating book Sexual Naturalization, these dyads have often been places where anxieties about belonging, nationalism, and citizenship have played themselves out.

I've always been reluctant, however, to read these marriages through the lens of someone like Fanon, for whom the desire for white women really meant the desire to embrace and be embraced by white civilization. Powerful as they are, these sorts of theories seem quite reductive when we think about all of the dimensions that compose interracial families. I'm curious to think about these families in alternative terms: what can they tell us about how we're changed by the families we inherit and create? Can ethnicity be more plastic than we give it credit for? Asian American studies has traditionally not always wanted to open up its canons to non-ethnically Asian writers, except when looking at tropes of Orientalism, but I believe this is a crucial move for the field to make. I'm not suggesting that we conflate different imaginative engagements with Asian America and pretend they come from the same subject position, but instead that we recognize that this imaginative territory has never been, and doesn't need to be, dominated by identity politics. Seeing the "I Married an Asian" stories as Asian American stories, to me, reflects an enrichment rather than a dimunition of the field.

White and Indian?

I've recently started rereading Robbie Clipper Sethi's 1996 novel in stories, The Bride Wore Red, which tells the interconnected stories of a multinational and multiracial Indian American family. I first came to this book about a decade ago; I remember reading it as a doctoral candidate in a little apartment on Clarendon Street just over the border from Washington, DC, where my office was a hand-me-down desk in the bedroom. My desk gave me a perfect view of my favorite local restaurant, Delhi Dhaba, where butter chicken has never been so cheap or so decadent. Delhi Dhaba was the kind of place where all the food was served cafeteria-style, where television in the top corners of the dining room constantly ran Bollywood, and where you could work on your dissertation in the quiet afternoon over a mango lassi.

The mixed clientele of Delhi Dhaba -- some South Asian, some not -- brings to mind the mingled Indian American worlds that Sethi writes about in her novel. As the back cover of the paperback hastens to tell us, Sethi is a white American woman who married an Indian Sikh; her author photo portrays her in a blond bob and an intricate sari. Her book launches with the mixed marriage of a white American, Sally, and an Indian Sikh, Deshi, in the mid-1970. From this starting point, we track the different trajectories of Deshi's family in and out of India and the US. Sethi's work was well-reviewed at the time of publication -- her style is in some respects a bit like Jhumpa Lahiri's, domestic realism -- but it never penetrated very far into mass culture or scholarly studies of South Asian literature.

In part, this may be because of the way in which her work quietly asks if it's possible to be white and Indian at the same time. Her Indian mothers are continually both recruiting their white daughters-in-law into South Asian identity but also holding them at arm's length; her white characters are both attracted to South Asian men but often find their rebellions against traditional South Asianness to be what allures them. And Sethi's own position as an author who is not of South Asian descent may further explain why this book hasn't penetrated into Asian American Studies as it might otherwise have. Given the way in which the field established itself in the 1960s and 70s as a response against white representations of Asian identity, it's not surprising that non-Asian writers haven't always been welcome within an ethnic studies paradigm, but it is surprising that the residuals of such a paradigm should hold sway decades later. It's only recently that we're beginning to see new interest in conceptualizing Asian American literature beyond the ethnic identity of the author. If this becomes more common, we might see Sethi as part of a neglected avant-garde.

Her book invites us to think about whether Indianness can be acquired, and if so, what that would mean. Is it a nationality? An ethnicity? A set of cultural practices? And where is the role of the family in all of this? Reading Sethi's work, I'm reminded of Safina Uberoi's documentary My Mother India, which tells the story of her white Australian mother and her Indian Sikh father living their lives together in India. At the end, Uberoi's voiceover concludes, "My father is Indian, and so is my mother." I wonder if the same could be said for Sethi's white characters, who (unlike Uberoi's mother) whose purchase on Indianness is solely through their husbands, their in-laws, and, potentially, their children. To what extent are our identities made by the families we grow and create, rather than by the families we are born into? Can social identities flow "upstream," as it were, so that an Indian American child might recalibrate the ethnic identities of her parents? Sethi's stories invite us to think about the slippery borders of identity, and about the responsibilities that come with these changing forms of identification. They are not always comforting. Her speakers are often prickly and resistant to norms of liberal tolerance; they aren't always the ones you would want to bear the standard for the modern multiracial family. But, as we move from voice to voice through the novel, we're constantly asked to reevaluate our perspective on both white and Indian (and white Indian) characters: to ask how they are slowly changing each other, and dislodging the meanings of their identities, over time.

Flight and Migration

Lately I've been thinking a good bit about refugee narratives, partly because I'm in the middle of Chris Cleave's novel Little Bee and partly because I'm teaching Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore. Both are novels that look at the life of refugees from Africa in a changing England; indeed, the first sentence of A Distant Shore is also its refrain. "England has changed." We might say the same of the US, France, Germany, or many other countries in the last decade; in Australia, debates about asylum-seekers continue to hold center stage.

The Australian government has recently proposed reviving an off-shore detention center for refugees in Papua New Guinea, a move which seems to crystallize the very uneasy relationship that many of these Western or Westernized governments have with refugees. On the one hand, countries like Australia want to be recognized as upholding humanitarian norms and providing sanctuary for individuals in crisis; on the other hand, such countries also want to keep these communities at arm's length, here by pushing asylum seekers beyond the physical borders of the nation. This proposed detention center in Papua New Guinea revives what was known as the "Pacific Solution" under the former conservative Howard government. It was dismantled under the Rudd government, but is now set to reopen under the watch of Rudd's successor Julia Gillard. The move has been criticized by both the left and the right, which both claim that offshore processing of refugees has led to human rights abuses. Placing asylum-seekers out of sight of mainland Australia seems to be a way of turning a blind eye to the realities of life in detention, where refugees -- many of them children -- spend years waiting indefinitely for their case to be heard. These spaces make all too vivid the state of exception, the place beyond the realm of properly political life that is nonetheless central to the nation's sense of itself. We think of these places as temporary, but for many, they are all too permanent. Crisis has become ordinary, and all the more wrenching because it now constitutes the new "normal" for many people.

Novels like Little Bee and A Distant Shore take us through such imagined detention centers in Europe, places that become a way of life for many of their inhabitants. I was struck by a moment just a few pages into Little Bee, where the narrator spies another young woman who, like her, is awaiting release from detention. "She was wearing a purple dress, an A-line dress with pink stars and moons in the pattern. She had a nice pink scarf wrapped around her hair, and purple flip-flops on her feet. I was thinking she must have been locked up a very long time in our detention center. One has to go through a very great number of the charity boxes, you will understand, to put together an outfit that is truly an ensemble." Cultivating normal life becomes an act of extreme determination, even heroism.

A Distant Shore is a novel I return to again and again when I think about the current situation of refugees, in part because it invites us to think about the connections between different generations of migrants. The story centers on the situation of a refugee from Africa who flees civil war after his family is massacred, and in this sense it responds to the wave of asylum-seekers in the 1990s who turned to Europe as an alternative to the violence of their homelands. But the African character, Solomon, was originally imagined not as a 1990s migrant from Africa but as a postwar immigrant from the Caribbean to England, part of the Windrush generation that brought the first big wave of mass migration from the colonies to the former imperial center. That generation faced an England that was often suspicious and hostile. When Caryl Phillips decided to turn his Windrush-generation protagonist into an African refugee of 1990s civil wars, this decision invites us to ask to what extent the England such migrants reached had changed. The novel invites us to think skeptically about the idea of progress and development; the England that Solomon encounters turns out to be as dangerous for him as his war-riven homeland. Without asking us to conflate the very different experiences of economic migrants in the postwar period with asylum-seekers at the turn of the millennium, the novel nonetheless suggests the potential continuities between their experiences. Such potential continuity is all the more poignant given that many of the most hostile faces to new migrants are actually migrants of an earlier generation. Many of my students attested to this anecdotally, noting that their grandparents, who had fled various parts of Europe during war, were often keen to differentiate their experiences from more recent asylum-seekers who have come to Australia from places like Vietnam. A Distant Shore registers this tension; it also notes the potential limitations of liberal approaches that idealize refugees and make them seem more innocent than they may be. The novel's power, it seems to me, is to show us the need to go beyond either the demonization or the ennoblement of asylum-seekers: to see them, in the end, not as a specter that can be confined to the off-shore margins of the nation's imaginary, but instead as crucial parts of the nation itself.

Happiness and Catastrophe

These past few months, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and writing about narratives of crisis and catastrophe. Stories of the search for reconciliation after mass violence, stories of disaster and devastation, stories of aid work and advocacy. After a while, this kind of narrative begins to take its toll, and I decided that the right complement to such reading would be to take a look at Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Nothing could be farther away from narratives of extraordinary pain, and nothing could be farther away from the language of academic critique.

 

The Happiness Project is very much a book of its time, a book that grows out of the perennial American quest for happiness and self-improvement. Like so many other memoirs published these days, it takes a year as its cycle of observation and commits its protagonist to a rigorous project of bolstering different dimensions of happiness each month. As a university teacher, I find it fascinating that while students often crave freedom from the discipline that a set curriculum of readings and assignments inspires, adults these days go to extreme lengths to replicate that sense of a required curriculum. Rubin picks a different monthly theme upon which she can concentrate her attention, devoting one month to marriage, another to contemplating eternity, yet another to considering money. The book is appealing, companionable, reading; Rubin is thoughtful and, like the good lawyer she once trained to be, alert for counterarguments to her emphasis on happiness.

 

What strikes me as the most obvious omission to this book – though, in full disclosure, I am still in the middle of “October” – is its limitation of happiness to the circle of private life. Although Rubin mentions at various points that happy people are more likely to engage in activities that help others, she doesn’t talk much about the relationship between happiness and citizenship (literal or metaphoric). In light of my immersion in narratives of individuals wrestling with political crisis of unimaginable scale, it’s hard not to think of certain kinds of happiness as politically enabled and constructed. This, after all, has been the point of thousands and thousands of pages written on feminism, racism, and imperialism. What do you do if the way to revitalizing your energy is not, per Rubin, to clean your closest, but instead to invent and advocate for the idea of the weekend?

 

To give Rubin credit, she does for the most part knowingly circumscribe the idea of a happiness project to people who are already enjoying basic levels of material comfort. And she points out, in ways that echo points Anthony Appiah has made in other contexts, that the very reason we might be concerned with the lives of others who are suffering from malaria in Africa or war in Iraq is because we believe that these people should be freed from poverty, disease, and violence to seek out happiness as they understand it. Political action, in this sense, always has the idea of some kind of happiness as its endpoint.

 

Yet it’s a little disappointing to see that none of Rubin’s experiments to date (and, guessing from her upcoming chapter titles, in the remaining months of her book) involve working for the happiness of those outside her immediate circle. In large part, I say this because it’s the kind of project I would most like to learn from; it is the kind of activity that I value highly, yet often shy away from in practice. It also raises questions that are germane to the literature of crisis with which I’m most concerned. What is it that draws individuals into aid work, and how might their happiness affect the kind of work they do? Is happiness possible in extreme situations of crisis?

 

Rubin, at one point, mentions a revealing anecdote of some friends who are civil rights workers. These activists hold strongly to the belief that one must do such political work for oneself, not for others. To espouse an altruistic viewpoint, in their perspective, makes one want gratitude in return; this creates a damaging expectation of indebtedness, whereas acting out of a sense of one’s own happiness allows all involved to remain equals. I wonder to what extent aid worker memoirs bear this idea out: after reading Rubin’s book, I’m curious to look at what such memoirs might tell us about the relationship between happiness, politics, and aid, as well as what they tell us about the infinite nature of suffering.

Indigenous Voices on Climate Change

I recently came across an online film festival called Indigenous Voices on Climate Change, http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/cop15-filmfestival/, a fascinating series of short films sponsored by the United Nations University to dramatize the effects of climate change on indigenous communities around the world. I watched two of them that focused on Australia -- one explored fire ecology of Arnhmen Land, and the other touched on the loss of biodiversity in Australia's wet tropics. The films are quite short, only five or six minutes long, and they're heavily invested in the idea of the indigenous person as a person with a special emotional connection to the land. Because the films are so brief, they really are only able to raise tantalizing questions about our iconography of climate change.

One of the most startling moments, in the film on biodiversity, was a series of shots that showed coastal Australia. The sea that we see first from afar is bright turquoise, the color of the water in the Caribbean, and it's quite alluring from a distance. But as the camera moves in closer, and we see the land not from an aeriel perspective but through the eyes of a woman walking, we come to realize that this turquoise water is not the natural bejeweled tone of the Caribbean -- instead, it is poisoned water turned toxic from a mine. All around it are the stark white skeletons of dead trees. The shock that I felt is assuredly the effect that the filmmaker sought, and the tightening of the camera gaze from a global optic to a local sightline seems to be precisely the logic behind the UN's focus on indigenous voices. The film offers a strong critique of the global viewpoint, casting this gaze as the mistaken, false view of the world that aestheticizes the suffering of local people and places.

But it also makes me wonder how this critique sits within the globalized perspective of the film festival, which encourages us to go move from the Baka peoples of Cameroon to nomadic tribes of Iran to refugees in Papua New Guinea. Is it possible to look globally and comparatively without, metaphorically speaking, confusing natural beauty with toxic waste? Is it possible to see these indigenous peoples featured in the films not simply as representatives of an intimacy with place that many urbanized, Westernized peoples feel they have lost, but also as new kinds of world citizens?

Word Maps

I recently discovered Wordle, a fascinating tool that allows you to make word maps out of anything you've written. Here's a word map of my book, Fiction Across Borders: the more I used a word, the bigger that word appears.