I do a lot of angry writing, very intentionally. This time was not supposed to be angry writing though. This time was supposed to be funny, witty and charming Aila - the Aila that can make jokes about how something you said or did made me feel like shit.
I started writing this piece months ago but it never sat right with me. I could not get my usual word vomiting self to write half a page, forget a 4 minute read! Then I realized I was reading only half of what Audre Lorde told me to do with anger.
She told me (and of course you), to feel anger, but also to process it. She told me that anger is productive if processed well and used in the right way. She did not tell me to sit and simmer in my anger while using humor as a defense mechanism to deal with how people make me feel. So I did that a little bit - I thought about why I was angry and more importantly, who I was angry at. My profound realization in the shower last night, with Jigelu rani playing in the background, was that I was angry at myself that:
When a commie bro told me that “identity politics like Dalit assertion and feminism are the cause for not achieving class revolution” instead of responding to him with “maybe the proletariat revolution would work, if you acknowledged intersectional identities” I kept quite because I convinced myself that he knows better.
I sat in the back of the car and said nothing, when an upper caste, upper class, traveler akka called a male-presenting person a “gay boy” because he was carrying a tote bag.
When someone I thought was a good friend shouted at me for not liking my eggs a certain way, I shrank, I walked away, and I cried in the bathroom without asking him why he thinks that his way of eating eggs was “better” in any way.
When an IT bro tried to explain to me why Sadguru’s save the soil movement was fantastic because IT bros did not even think about soil conservation before that, I joked about how easy it was to ignore injustices committed in the name of religion and ‘conservation’ but ran into a meeting immediately.
When some random Nallakunta Brahmin boy tried to tell me that the Instagram page ‘sanitary panels’ was anti-national because it supports Umar Khalid, all I did was tell him that Umar is a friend of mine, and if he is anti-national, then I don’t know what patriotism means - and then then blocked him without engaging in any real conversation.
Two days ago, when a North Indian didi playing Punjabi and Bhojpuri songs at an Indian Students’ event on my university campus asked me very condescendingly if I “Had been drinking” when I asked her to play a South Indian song, I simply said “no. of course not” instead of asking her why she thinks I was drunk, or why she thinks drinking was a bad thing at an event that has absolutely no rules about drinking.
There is, of course, anger that I feel about the everyday existence of being a woman, of color, in America, caring about the climate and human rights and simply existing in the world. Anger about Dalit women getting raped and murdered, Prof. Sai Baba still being in prison, VV not being able to come home, hijab wearing girls not being able to go to school, journalists being killed and jailed and about a thousand other things there is barely anything I can do anything about. But in all those situations, I could have done something different - simply said something, continued the conversation. Maybe, then just maybe there would be a couple less ass-holey people in the world today? Maybe not, but I would have felt better for trying.
The thing is though, in all of those situations, I was scared. I was scared that my privilege might be clouding my politics. I was scared that a Europe trip that I could barely afford would be destroyed if I called out bigotry. Or a friendship broken, if I demonstrated vulnerability (was that even friendship, let’s talk about that another day). I was scared that I would hurt other people’s friendships with each other by calling out islamophobia. And I was afraid that I would hurt the community feeling by calling out South Indian stereotypes among North Indian people. It’s almost funny how fear and self-directed anger go hand in hand, right?
In retrospect, I acknowledge that a lot of the “fear” was just insecurity. The worst case in any of those scenarios is not worse than knowing I did nothing. So today, I decided not to try to be funny at all. To sit with my fears, and my anger. I decided to feel what it feels like to put this anger into words. So, you are now reading this blog by an extremely privileged person being angry at herself for not calling out other privileged people’s deep seated bigotry and hatred because I was afraid and you are reading this turn into an apology to myself and everyone else that these same people made to feel like shit; And you are reading this become a promise.
A promise to be more present, to be more disruptive, to accept discomfort and the possibility of losing some people from my life - if for no other reason, than to be a little less angry every day.