Turns out it is very hard to do new things. For me. Sometimes. There’s a new thing that I have had in my drafts, in my to-do list for a long time now. And I take this opportunity here to announce I will just do said new thing today. Whatever it will be it will be. Ok that’s done.
Also turns out apple pie and the day where sometimes we all eat together and don’t have school or work tomorrow, really are stuck together in my mind. I’m going to make it, which basically means I’m going to buy apples and a pre-made crust and something called angostura bitters. It’s from a recipe I saved in my book from a kids magazine called Kazoo that had simple recipes kids could make, and legit everyone says the banana bread I made from that same magazine is the best they ever tasted, so I’m sticking with it. (Actually Kazoo got that banana recipe from award-winning chef Joanne Chang, so thank you Joanne!)
My goal is to be an extremely generous writer that gives you so much value that you cannot turn away, (you even one day, might even dare I say it, pay for it?) But right now I’m not all the way generous. I’m at times angry, at times closed up a bit, at times ‘don’t think everyone needs to know all my business’. But I think telling you this is also a kind of generosity.
My writing desk and the office it sits in is probably my second favorite part of of my home. First is my daughter’s desk that she never sits at which faces a wall of tree, squirrels and quiet.
I have had this link open in my phone browser for quite some time, I’d like to close that link and memorialize it here: https://taymiyazaman.com/history/chasing-india-in-mexico-city/
Taymiya Zaman writes about South Asia, colonialism and her experience moving to Mexico City in 2017, studying the history of colonialism there, and finding herself switching back and forth between identifying with both colonizer and the indigenous colonized. The complexity with which she explores this subject is why this piece remains an open tab.
She talks about how colonialism which took place five centuries ago in Mexico is still part of living memory for many in South Asia. Our parents, their parents, that’s it. They remember things. Sometimes talk about them. Often not. Often put it aside. Until you really sit down and ask. It’s really insane if you think about it?! What is known only through some space and distance, what is forgotten in that distance?
Zaman speaks about her own reactions while reading some of the earliest texts by Spaniards and non-Western Ottoman Muslim writers recounting their impressions of ancient indigenous Mexicans and their cultures. The similarities between her initial reactions, the first Christian Spaniards, and the first Ottoman Muslims in terms of the disgust around the indigenous cultural rituals around human sacrifice, dismembering of bodies, extraction of a beating heart. These rituals connected to ceremony and sacred time. What must the first colonizers have felt about their responsibility to DO something about their disgust? Why couldn’t they look away and leave people alone? Is there something about monotheistic religions and a culture of colonization? Writers analyzing their own process in a piece about colonization is probably my favorite genre.
Zaman also talks about way we use power within the English language. The way perhaps I do, and many other writers do.
“This is a power move I recognize from my own childhood and I am ashamed to say I have used it myself. To be educated in Pakistan is to be educated in English and correcting someone’s English is the quickest way to put them in their place.”
I think about the vestiges of British colonialism in the South Asian continent when I think about this. How it is in English that Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis can put each other in their place, here in the U.S. and also back in the homeland. Then I remember what I said earlier, how close to gaining independence from the British the South Asian continent actually is. Also I need to read the accounts of Indians and Bangladeshis in the subcontinent but also across the diaspora, in English. I am also grateful that we can write each other messages across the oceans in this language. That we can also say secret fuck yous in the language of the colonizer. I like that about writing in English, we can do whatever we want with it. We can make it ours. Add our own words, fuck up the grammar, and punctuation exists for our own fun. It doesn’t matter what they say about how we should write. It only matters that we say the things.
Zaman writes of Nahuatl, the language of the Indigenous Mexicans:
“Nahuatl, I learn, has no gendered third-person pronouns, and I imagine what it felt like to think in Nahuatl and speak Spanish, to feel desire that didn’t translate, or to feel forced into a language that made you a child or a liar. There is no third-person gender in Urdu either, and the word we use for friend, lover, and companion — dost, yaar, saathi — are often the same.”
Is this too long, I should wrap this up now maybe? I still have to do the thing which I have been putting off and make the apple pie.
I’ll end with Zaman’s final thoughts about the marigolds. She is speaking about what we call our own homes, our lands is as much a weird soup of the ancient as it is the complex histories of Europe, colonizers, and the New World.
“The bougainvillea I associate with my parents’ house in Karachi is named after the French Navy admiral, Louis Antoine de Bougainvillea, who circumnavigated the earth in the 18th century and brought the flower with him from Brazil to France, from where it came to be cultivated in Britain, and then in British colonies, including India.”
“Marigolds, once ceremonial flowers for Tlaloc, the (Aztec) god of rain and water, crossed the Atlantic and made their way to India, where they are now offered as garlands to a different set of gods.”
My mother and I buried a dead kitten on Saturday. We found it between the outer gate and inner cellar door of our home and I don’t know when it entered but it hadn’t been there long. It was so beautiful and barely looked dead. We buried it in a little piece of dirt in the back. There wasn’t much ceremony, we were crying and silent while we did this and that felt like enough. But my mom did find a small bloom of marigold to place on top of the dirt after we were done. Her lifelong ceremonial, altar flower. It was just love at that point.
Also I’m feeling generous so here’s that banana bread recipe: https://thewoksoflife.com/banana-bread/