Colour-coordinated Home Cooking

Popular Wisdom

It has been an unusual weekend of gathering wisdom from the most unlikely of sources. One which began as my flight landed at Adelaide Airport on Friday evening. I had been conferencing in Brisbane the previous week and was undoubtedly weary. But the emotional turmoil resulting from seeing families travel together and unaccompanied travellers get embraced by kith and kin cannot be explained through fatigue. I was grateful for the professional opportunities I had thus far received, but at what cost? No one told me there was a sacrifice involved. Or that it entailed such a degree of self-reliance.

I have always craved the independence I now (almost) have, so why the hollowness? Well, while contemplating all of the above the following Saturday, I accidentally began watching The Princess Diaries, something I would not announce on an academic profile. Then there was the penultimate scene where the much-flawed and drenched character played by Anne Hathaway declares to a regal audience the reason she chose to take up the 'princess's job'. She said it was because this time it wasn't about her, but the others who could potentially benefit from the smooth carrying out of her duties. My scepticism about aristocracy and chick flicks aside, this is just the piece of advice I needed at that point. Settled or otherwise, I was not going to make my parents or friends or students any happier by drowning in melancholy.

Then there came the astrological column in the local daily suggesting Aquarians had a once in a lifetime opportunity to let go of the past. Again, potentially cliched, but it meant a lot to me in context. This happens to be a time when a lot of old tangible and intangible 'things' are biting the dust. I am going to choose to feel happy about the new opportnities this presents, as well as the space this creates in my life for hitherto unexperienced experiences. I also need to forgive myself just as I have forgotten and forgiven others. As I was worrying about the ghosts of persons past, I got the following message from a friend - "There's no bad karma of yours that hasn't been offset by their's. Mediaeval etiquette: It is bad manners to serve a lady while you are wearing a helmet". On that note, I decided to try and shed my emotional pessimism, work-related overdrive and general lack of exuberance. No point in attempting to be a supergirl when it hard enough being a 'normal' one. Breathe...

Displacement for the Always Already Displaced

Eight more days of transit, and I can't wait to arrive. The importance of journeying notwithstanding, a combination of stability and uncertainty might be better than having your goods in two or more places. So many split selves.

This is the longest relationship I've had with a house outside of my parental home. Just over four years is not a long time, but encompassing my transition from a shaken twenty-one year old girl to a more realistic and self-assured person has been a significant shift. It may not be the rosiest period of my life, or the most memorable s/pace, but it has been meaningful in its own right. Its space has allowed me to experiment, to fail, to stand up again and to celebrate with good friends. It has given me room to manouevre around my own developing self, which I'm sure will continue to grow and learn.

The comfort zone established by this house and its radius has also generated a spatial inertia over the past couple of years that I have been craving to move beyond. I only have to shop in a new supermarket or buy coffee from a different cafe or drive down an unknown street to feel alive and adventurous. The hassle of un-cluttering and financial-physical-psychological stress aside, I am looking forward to this change. It is a small step towards tangibly letting go of a past that once felt like a giant leap. Lest I forget, changing countries/continents is a bigger ask. How could I have come to fear displacement? It is not the absence of roots, but an excess. A potentially constructive, creative excess at that. The Always Already Displaced need not be detached entities floating amoebically in deterritorialised discourse, we should feel at home everywhere.

It annoyed initially that this change beckons just as I am approaching a full draft of my doctoral thesis, and a not too distant submission date. However, my time management skills were probably in need of a force beyond control of this magnitude. And my intellectual-emotional energies, narrativising the project in the final chapter, were also possibly clamouring for a more recent, more embodied experience of displacement. This is not to say that the previous displacements have been forgotten, only that they have become souvenirs. A notebook here, a t-shirt there, and some furniture to deal with. Also, there are the episodes that have been consciously erased. Tears and troubled waters are now being mingled with hopes and dreams. A changed external configuration, an altered path of everyday existence may or may not make a difference to old habits that have turned into hindrances. But this time I'm looking out for light, not for ample space. If I can open my bedroom blinds in the new house, I will have let the outside in, the inside out.

Displaced Thought c

There are other 'things' that need to go. Perhaps an online garage sale is the answer. Dangling earrings that I will not wear any more. Big statement necklaces that are lying unnoticed. Shoes that are a size too big or small, but good as new. Bags that could fetch moolah from vintage buyers. I'm feeling the change, and not just in terms of my current wardrobe. File, fold, give, take, the cycle continues.

Displaced Thought b

The first phase of packing up has been exhausting, but I was surprised to discover a $100 Dymocks bookstore voucher amongst the contents of my bookshelf. What a godsent! Not that I'm itching to buy anything in particluar at the moment, but this is incentive enough to get rid of those books that I have no academic or emotional attachment to. Some of them are giveaways from my year of sub-editing the literature section of the student newspaper 'On Dit', and others are spur-of-the-moment purchases that are best classified as 'chick lit'. Adios.

Displaced Thought a

I have successfully avoided moving houses for four and a half years. This is not because of any spiritual attachment to my current place, but partly because my last moving experience resulted in a broken wrist and a stolen laptop, and largely by virtue of that sin called sloth. So it is that time of life again, but I hope to unclutter properly in this instance. One steady step at a time.

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.