Voice-over to End 'I Journey...'

I journeyed to Canada to interview filmmaker Deepa Mehta. I stayed with my cousin sister, her husband, and their four-year old son. I also spent time with my Mum's cousin and her partner in Toronto. It struck me that I was unlikely to meet this tree of the family, this curve of the paisley in India.

Yet I was considered an Australian researcher by Toronto Airport baggage officials and the crew on Mehta's film set. It was the accent they said, which sounded like it had journeyed and picked up its lyric on distant shores.

Will this journey end? Discussions about 'settling down' have become rife amongst family. The paisley might be reaching the border of the pashmina shawl. It may be time to wrap it around my shoulders, but I will not do it the traditional way. I will morph this Indianness and turn it into a scarf, a skirt, a throw, a photograph, a living memory. I will settle only if my future remembers this detail, this evidence of a journey.

On speaking English

I'm reading renowned hybrid cultural theorist Ien Ang's On not speaking Chinese, and wondering about my own ambivalent relationship with the English language, especially in its accented and translated mutations. In her book, Ang justifies the use of autobiographical discourse as a means of both asserting the authority of authenticity, and undermining the grandeur of hegemonic narratives. Being a person of Chinese descent who was born in Indonesia, schooled in the Netherlands and is currently working in the Australian academy, her hyphenations are multiple and complex. She apologises for not being able to speak Chinese while also arguing that the shifting identity politics of the Chinese diaspora need not be anchored in a fixed linguistic identity associated with the homeland. 

In my own case, I vividly recall being asked as to where I learnt 'such good English' in formal and informal settings during my early days in Australia. This was a compliment at times, but largely a source of petulance because I didn't think an Australian (or any 'native' English speaker, other than those with the appropriate literary acumen) was in a position to pronounce judgement on my English-speaking skills. Once during an English Literature class where the tutor handed us a sheet on 'Zero Tolerance Errors in Formal Written English' accompanied by red marks on our assignments, I was surprised to see the sheer number of grammatical and syntactical corrections in the papers of my Australian-schooled peers. Now, as a tutor in the Humanities myself, I have to admit that overseas students with a shorter history of studying English struggle more with the language that their local counterparts. However, indifference to the rules of grammar and punctuation is often rampant in the writing and speech of many university goers, irrespective of nationality. In other words, who can judge whom?

I realise that as someone who attended English-medium schools in India where the Queen's English still prevailed, I am more privileged than most. I wouldn't admit to thinking in the language all the time, but its spoken version has become more relaxed and colloquial during my time in Australia. It is still the instrument of my intellect, of my creative impulses, and hence my work self values it above the other Indian language I have learned - Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. Why did I not conduct the documentary interviews in one of these languages? Salman Rushdie and others in the diaspora have often commented on English being a link language in the linguistically-diverse Indian sub-continent. Therefore, the choice of English was strategic so as to access a wider range of people of Indian origin, as well as to render the doco semi-autobiographical.

Privileged I may be in some ways, but my experience of being a translator and interpreter for the Indian languages I am conversant in has brought me into contact with Indians and Pakistanis who are new migrants or on the struggling end of the socio-economic scale. Their stories have often been difficult to translate, but the role of mediator has taught me that transferring from one cultural idiom to another is not necessarily a loss. What is gained is an understanding, however stilted, of the seemingly inaccessible other. There are no doubt miles to go for improving this communication and making it more than a literal exchange of words. In the meantime, being aware of the relativity of linguistic and cultural norms is a crucial starting point.

Fragment d

I'm rummaging through forgotten drawers and discovering old wealth. What is this treasure? Gifts and cards. Music and soul food. Silver bangles with crests and troughs. Amethyst. Letters from my sister. Birthday messages. Notes. Audio cassettes from my sixteen year old days. Shakira, Elton John, Guns n Roses, Celine Dion, Zubeida. What taste. As electic as ever. And few photos. I wish I had them all here. I itch to print the digital ones. A new project?

Fragment c

And then there is the unconscious, almost fetishistic Japanese consumption at the moment. I'm reading Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, bought the films Japanese Story and Tokyo Story from Borders, and had a craving for udon noodles. But how can one exotic want another, and other itself further? I'm watching a female Australian geologist explore the contours of a Japanese businessman's body. The music is tragically beatiful. Tragic because I know how the film ends. Beautiful because the traditional male gaze of Hollywood cinema is reversed, if not subverted. Would it have been possible if the male body was white? Therein lies another story.

Fragment b

This has also been a week without my Motorola mobile phone whose charging port broke down. I am currently using my old spearmint Nokia which is the equivalent of a gramophone record in the age of iTouch. Messaging is awkward, and I had to manually feed in almost 80 numbers. There is a new purchase decision to be made. But for now, I miss my jazz ring tone, the snooze alarm and the text message reminders. Talk about material attachments. Affective material attachments.

Fragment a

It has been been five days, and I am missing updating my status on Facebook (besides having my friends and family contacts at my fingertips). Is this a withdrawl symptom? Am I that narcissistic? I think it is both a means of procrastination and a somewhat public writing tool for me.

Online Experiments

I've been set a challenge by a friend - not to use Facebook for a week. This is not to illustrate my addiction to the ubiquitous social networking site. I don't perceive it as an addiction, merely a daily ritual which can be curiously time-consuming. Moreover, it might be acting as a substitute for real-time relationships instead of facilitating them. I spend a large proportion of my day reading and writing, so would prefer the voice and laughter of my friends and family to emoticons and lols. There is no doubt in my mind that I can cut off Facebook in the short term, and reduce usage in the longer term. A more pertinent question is - can this lead me to make more contact with friends and acquaintances? Will I be motivated to reorganise my social life and step out of the triangular comfort zone with the University, the Borders store, and the Nova Cinemas as its three focal points? The irony is I am blogging about this experiment, and will probably continue to do so. At least I have more than 150 characters to e-x-p-l-a-i-n.

And then there is another project I've had in mind for a while. I'm always on the lookout for new Adelaide cafes, and now also increasingly interested in which ones have free wifi as well as a work-and-socialising culture. Besides the Gloria Jean's cafe at the Borders store in Rundle Mall, Cibo on Rundle Street, and Chocolate Bean, it is hard to come across coffee shops where researchers like myself can just walk in, sip a latte and work on their laptops or read away to bliss. I plan to visit a number of indie and lesser known hangouts in the Adelaide CBD during the lunch hour over the next couple of weeks and take some photos. What is the vibe in these places? Are there many individuals with books, laptops and cameras for company here? Do these individuals interact? Will keep thou posted.

Interiority and the Elements

While catching up with a friend, I stumbled upon a potential solution for the content-analysis chapter of my thesis. The trouble so far has been that I want to stay away from traditional film or textual theory, while still talking about narrative through a particular lens. I have done three drafts of the chapter, with the first trying to amalgamate postcolonial and feminist concerns and project them onto a diasporic space, and the second and third spending a lot of word space on the genealogy of diaspora and why reading diasporic work calls for an organic approch. When I coined the 'organic' way of looking at film, I had just returned from a two-month sojourn in monsoon-flooded India, and was quite obsessed with the ideas of a life-like pace and fluidity in the context of representation (which is probably also why the first cut of my doco was unconventionally lingering). Looking back, it was a reaction to an overload of theory and I am now ready to give new life to this chapter.

What is this new life? I will not repress it under new age nomenclature and call it 'organic', but there is a particular kind of spatial and temporal composition in all three films of Mehta's trilogy that plays on binary oppositions like interior and exterior, light and shade, colour and austerity, poverty and wealth etc. There is an engagement with the interiority of the domestic space that is a motif for the interior lives of the characters themselves (and perhaps also a reflection on the diasporic artist's insulation from the present of the homeland, a space/place of memory and re-creation).

When thinking about the films from the point of view of a practitioner, I realised that I was most interested in the choices made by the writer-director. These choices not only pertain to detail and colour, both being aspects that Mehta is admittedly pedantic about. They are also macro choices - Why is the set constructed in a particular city? How is the set put together? What is the vision of the production designer? How does the cinematographer translate this vision? I realised that my documentary is also set in a range of domestic spaces, and I made this decision as I wanted the home of the interviewee to be entwined with the content of our conversation. These choices are crucial to the fabric of the films in question, and an analysis of the same fits in with the essence of my thesis argument. What is this essence? That diasporic creativity is not deterritorialised, but reterritorialised. In other words, a diasporic artistic practice like film is made and re-made at every stage of its conception and production, and viewed and re-viewed in each new socio-economic context. A consideration of both the global and local spaces of meaning-making is significant to a holistic understanding of diasporic creative impulses and pratices. And a consideration of diasporic creativity in turn is intergral to comprehending a world whose cultural and economic capital no longer adhere to east-west distinctions.

Freewheeling Free Will

I haven't written on my blog in a while because of a combination of reasons - I have had no time to write, and no will to create this time. The last couple of weeks have been emotionally and physically exhausting, but also rewarding in a curious way that I can't quite articulate yet. It has been a time when decisions were made and altered from one moment to the next. I would like to think that I exercised my own free will in arriving at and living through these decisions, albeit my free will decided it wanted to freewheel.

The wheel is still rolling, but I'm ready to reflect on its movement. There may be a pattern of sorts and even a particluar colour at certain times. However, I wonder if it is the norm for this wheel to roll, for my will to waver, for my decisions to appear indecisive. Thankfully, women around the world, as Jennifer Fox's brilliant documentary Flying explores, are riddled with choices that are not necessarilly freeing. Fox herself flees from her mother and grandmother, only to find her life is revolving around the poles that are a series of men. She chooses one in the end, and also makes peace with the matriarchal figures. But is she a free woman?

Am I a free woman? The choice I'm making now is, on the surface, more confining that freeing. Scratching the surface, however, I feel it will eventually enable me to freewheel, fly and flout with greater aplomb. I also want to capture this newfound freedom in my documentary. Perhaps film a Skype conversation with my parents, or other moments of difficulty. There is poetry in difficulty. The paisley cannot be contained any longer. It will double over. It's shadow will end the film. This shadow will journey too.

Incubating in the Warm Light of the Academy

I didn't think I would write so soon after the most recent apparaisal of a draft of the introductory chapter of my thesis. I wanted my writing to return to its quasi-authoritative academic tone, one more appropriate for a successful PhD completion and greater publishing potential. I began to wonder if writing this blog for nearly two years now has spoilt me vis-a-vis a career in academia. Why can't a text remain provisional? I understand that my thesis, my film, even my blog have to be 'about something'. But, and herein lies my most demonstrable attempt at writerly assertiveness - I think these 'abouts' are multi- and contextual. Yes, the Academy is progressive enough to encompass the lengths and depths of a particular set of texts or even an entire genre, but it remains uncomfortable with anything that is, by nature, transient. Why this resistance to the ephemeral?

It is 'certainly' my migrant-state that attracts me to transitory form(s). However, temporary residents the world over cannot wait to be 'permanent'. And those in a somewhat settled situation long to get out, to travel. I'm not condoning a gypsy-esque existence for all and sundry, or an experimental discourse for all kinds of writing. It would be mighty nice if the Hegemonic social and academic powers that be began to recognise transience as a healthy expression of thought and emotion rather than consider it a sign of weakness, or dimiss it as just another juvenile phase.

Although I'm still incubating, I will 'probably' continue writing. The cost of not writing is higher than the cost of writing provisionally. Whether (and when) this or any other text will see the light of day that is critical approval is difficult to gauge. But the light here is warm and ideal for a timely emergence from the apprenticeship, a tentative fluttering of slow-growing wings.