Looking Normal and Acting Weird
A few years ago, I met a man on the underground subway of Brooklyn, New York who approached me with a question.
“You sound weird. Not from around here, aren’t ‘cha?”
It took a while to process and answer the type of question he was asking me. It didn’t sound insulting. And he certainly looked curious at most. It certainly wasn’t something I hadn’t been asked before. So why did that particular question, in that particular moment, feel so offensive? Possibly because from the, supposed hundreds of people around me, he chose to ask the girl conversing about menial things with her friend next to her, bothering no one. Especially not him. In retrospect, he was probably trying to hit on me, but why did he have to start off with that question, why not something menial like the weather? Probably never works, but hey, he could have given it a try. But why that question? Did I sound that different from the Persian woman who talked with a harsher accent on the phone? Or the little girl asking her mother when the train would come in a French- sounding voice? I was from California, for God’s sake. There wasn’t anything weird from that. I thought so, at least.
In the end of this little spiel, I still wondered why he chose me and what was it about me that looked different — that sounded different. So I remember asking him, “What do you mean?”
He said, “Well, not that it was that weird, just wanted to know where you’re from. Sounded like it wasn’t from here, that’s all.”
Well, then. Now, that was rude. It felt rude, and it certainly was rude to me. It was something about the way he nonchalantly answered me, as if he didn’t just alienate my person from the rest of the people in the same space, that just pissed me off.
“I’m not from here, but I don’t understand how that could be any of your business. I don’t think I sounded so different from everyone else around here that you felt the need to question me about it. You sound weird to me too, but I didn’t go over to you and say that to your face.”
Afterwards, he left with a confused and angered look on his face. It wasn’t his fault, really. I think at the time, when the cultivation of myself as a person was brought out into the light to be seen and dissected, it became a little hard to come into terms with it. Even now, every time I think back to this particular memory, I feel horrified. Horrified that this idea that I was different, that I brought something unnervingly different to the table that it made me stand out. Made me a target.
Did I feel like a target? At the time, no. Now, most definitely.
No, because technically, he wasn’t asking with the intent to be offensive — with the drive to make it known that he felt that I didn’t look the same nor sounded the same as everyone else. He was just being curious, but you know, there is a reason people say that “curiosity killed the cat.” Because wanting to know about everything can get you killed — or in my case, not get you the number.
Then there’s the “yes”. Yes, he offended me and yes, looking back at it now, it was incredibly scary. Scary because the thought that in this century, where America has experienced it’s first African- American president, where LGBTQ+ marriage rights were created and acknowledged, and when technological leaps and bounds has propagated a father reach in knowledge and information has still not corrected this “you are different from me” mindset.
Let’s get something straight here. This is not a racist commentary, nor is it even a sexist remarks on society. It is a plain commentary on the societal norms to be similar to each other, but also having a very conscientious mindset that certain people are also different from the rest on an, albeit minuscule, level.
In the “Can the Subaltern Speak”, Spivak makes an effort to educate Western values and people as to why those classifying as the “subaltern” are people who cannot retaliate against spoken and written values because they are misunderstood. I think in a way, this idea is close to what has happened between that man and I. He had an established thought of how certain people are different, and he had enforced it upon me by focusing on things that he thought were “different” than the norms he was used to. Quantifying it as somehow due to the fact that I was not from “around here”. And as the subaltern at the time, did not understand why he had asked me that question nor understood what the implementations of his question was towards my being. I think that even now, I still won’t get an answer as to why, but that’s fine. Because now, I am in the power to understand and therefore will never again qualify as a subaltern.
