APA Heritage Month: Shaping
ABCD. The lie: “American born confused desi.” We are: American-born converged desis. America-based culture devisers. Aprender building community diaspora. A bacha creando domicilio.
Asianness [Ages 0–6]. The tip of my tongue may have learned Gujrati, then English, then Hindi, then Spanish, but the seeds of California heritage shimmer strong as I slip and slide Spanish palabras into my Gujrati matra basha. My Jain, Vaishnu parents unveiled me to prayer, to sounds poetic and unknown, teaching me the world has mysteries we understand just through feeling. Only later did I learn that the temple spoke Tamil, and I did not. Gujrati identity melded through a South Indian conduit, that double helixing of cultures was necessary for my existence. The double helix mudra, my hand movement of choice.
Brown [Ages 6–20]. In neighborhoods where being Brown meant ugly, it wasn’t initially the South Asian communities around me, saturated with colonial remnants of colorism, but Black, Latinx, and Asian communities that helped me deconstruct systems of oppression. To deconstruct ugliness inside of me. These communities shared their politics-bell hooks; their stories-Sandra Cisneros; their teachers-Ella Baker. These communities helped me decide who and how I want to be. Through them and my younger sister, I saw what had been purposefully hidden: the Adivasi and dalit communities’ battles for equity and freedom among South Asian people. I saw the role that I and other children of the diaspora must play to question and topple delusions of peace. It’s no surprise then that when I dance, my hands flow into kathak mudras, my feet cut with a hip hop heel-toe-flick-glidddeee, while my hips wander into the twists of belly-dancing. See, I am composed of the gifts of culture-holders, culture-sharers, culture-devisers.
Community-building [Always]. Community building has meant dancing with other girls in gelid cement garages on TGIF Fridays, our feet repeating the rhythms of ancient folk narratives to new music on new land. Community building has meant walking our feet to the chant Black Lives Matter, blocking highways and holding each other close to win the fight of a hundred generations. Community-strengthening has meant taking my childhood belief that borders don’t make sense and aligning my work as a lawyer, as an organizer with DREAMers and indigenous activists who remind us that water is life: we are water. Borders do not exist. Our scalpel-cutting opens lines and wounds we make into the land, the mind, and the body, but it won’t make borders real. Community-building is where I learned what diaspora looks like: the bringing together, the creating together, the revering and reinventing the old together. The together.
Destroying [Started in high school, continuing]. I was destroying the world I knew as I came to understand systemic racism, colonialism, capitalism. These injustices could not be explained with my limited ideas of karma or ‘everything happens for a reason,’ the bachahood beliefs. In this madness vortex where I had stopped believing in anything, it was hula, a dance of prayer, that connected me back to my form of prayer in raas and garba. Gentle and fierce, hula, like garba, retaught me to reshape the world with my movements. Hula taught me, with stepping my right foot and lifting my left hip, that opposition creates possibility. Hula taught me to play with clay in my hands, literally creating the world I want to see.
And now? I understand how to carve from the lessons and the teachings of what it means to be a child of the diaspora. And I carve a live sculpture, a different sculpture, a sculpture that refuses to be silent. A sculpture that speaks in many tongues.
