Monthly Archives: May 2006

Femme Fatale

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A few weeks ago, I made my merry way to The Gladstone Hotel for the launch of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s new book, Consensual Genocide (also available at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore) . I arrived early and thirsty after doing a bit of cybernet sleuthing…having only read a couple of her poems previously, the research was very necessary:leah.jpg

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha was raised in Worcester , Massachusetts , the daughter of a Sri Lankan father and an Irish/ Ukrainian mother. After moving to New York for four whirlwind years of coming of age in the middle of riot grrl, queer, anarchist and student of color organizing, she moved to Toronto in 1997 in the hopes of no longer being the only Sri Lankan in the room. Her work has been published in the anthologies Colonize This!, Dangerous Families , With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn , the Lambda Award-nominated Brazen Femme, Without a Net, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws and A Girl’s Guide To Taking Over the World . A frequent contributor to Colorline s and Bitch magazines, she has performed her work throughout North America, from gigs at Yale University and Oberlin College to benefits for queer youth resource centers and at antiwar protests. She teaches writing to LGBT youth at Supporting Our Youth Toronto, for which she won the City of Toronto Community Service to Youth Award in 2004, and is one of the organizers of the Asian Arts Freedom School. [Link]

Respect!

My experience within the Toronto literary scene is a sad state of affairs so I was feeling a little unsure of my footing in the creative landscape that is West Queen West (TO’s Soho, why do we have to have these NY rip off names, WHY? Another time, another post 🙂 As my frothy malt bevvie began to settle I caught Leah standing nearby, talking with friends. Her remarkable bio had me a little star struck so the best I could muster was an awkward smile/nod combo in her direction. She promptly walked over and gave me a hug as if we had been friends forever. Let us pretend, for the sake of my silly pride, that it was not simply a case of mistaken identity…hugs rule! You could say that the hug or even the sheer amount of M.I.A. playing at the launch informed my resulting opinion of it. You would not be entirely wrong. Continue reading →

I used to love H.E.R

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I met this girl, when I was ten years old
And what I loved most she had so much soul
She was old school, when I was just a shorty
Never knew throughout my life she would be there for me
On the regular, not a church girl she was secular
Not about the money, no studs was mic checkin her
But I respected her, she hit me in the heart
A few new york niggaz, had did her in the park
But she was there for me, and I was there for her
Pull out a chair for her, turn on the air for her
And just cool out, cool out and listen to her
Sittin on a bone, wishin that I could do her
Eventually if it was meant to be, then it would be
Because we related, physically and mentally
And she was fun then, I’d be geeked when she’d come around
Slim was fresh yo, when she was underground…

–partial lyrics to “I used to love H.E.R.” by Common

In the lyrics above from one of my favorite songs, Common laments about the debasement suffered by his true love, real hip-hop music. The BBC reports on a recent international hip-hop conference in Connecticut where it was evident that the love is being kept alive in other countries around the world, countries where artists treat hip-hop music how she was meant to be treated:

A recent international hip-hop festival which brought together rap artists from around the world has raised the question of why non-US rap is so political – whereas mainstream American rap appears frivolous…

Rolando Brown, of event sponsors the Hip-hop Association, said the festival highlighted there was “more of a focus on positive community development” outside the US…

We have been able to filter out the elements of sex, money and drugs – you don’t get that in Tanzania,” he explained.

“You don’t get airplay if you talk about these things in your music. Over 99% of the rap in Tanzania is in Swahili – and it actually has a political message to it.”

“They are the records that sell and appeal to a wider demographic of people than any type of music…” [Link]

Especially in Africa, hip-hop music is being used as a positive tool to advocate AIDS prevention, political participation, urban youth issues etc. Although I don’t think homegrown, socially conscious hip-hop has penetrated the culture in South Asia too deeply yet, it seems like only a matter of time before popular homegrown artists will emerge. If readers know of any such emerging hip-hop artists living in South Asian countries that rhyme about political/social issues we’d love to see some links in the comments section. Continue reading →

KaavyaGate reloaded

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A NYT tipster has found more lifted passages in Opal Mehta from yet another chick lit tome, Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella (author of Shopaholic), circa 2004.

At least three portions in the book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, by Kaavya Viswanathan, bear striking similarities to writing in Can You Keep a Secret? … the phrasing and structure of some passages is nearly identical. [Link]

The structural similarities between both versions of this passage seem damning. (It is one contiguous passage):

Can You Keep a Secret? Opal Mehta

“And we’ll tell everyone you got your Donna Karan coat from a discount warehouse shop.”

Jemima gasps. “I didn’t!” she says, color suffusing her cheeks.

“You did! I saw the carrier bag,” I chime in. “And we’ll make it public that your pearls are cultured, not real…”

Jemima claps a hand over her mouth…

“OK!” says Jemima, practically in tears. “OK! I promise I’ll forget all about it. I promise! Just please don’t mention the discount warehouse shop. Please.”

“And I’ll tell everyone in that in eighth grade you used to wear a ‘My Little Pony’ sweatshirt to school every day,” I continued.

Priscilla gasped. “I didn’t!” she said, her face purpling again.

“You did! I even have pictures,” I said. “And I’ll make it public that you named your dog Pythagoras…”

Priscilla opened her mouth and gave a few soundless gulps…

“Okay, fine!” she said in complete consternation. “Fine! I promise I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll talk to the club manager. Just please don’t mention the sweatshirt. Please.”

Continue reading →

So Long. Farewell. Go Vote.

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This past week, I flew in and out of NYC for a conference on the civic engagement of immigrant youth, which incidently, also included U.S.-born to immigrant parents. Considering the political climate this month, this roundtable was very interesting to be a part of. Electoral youth organizing is something I’ve been doing for the past 8 years, and working on the civic engagement of desi youth has been my passion for the past few years. In 2004, the youth vote turned out in significant successful numbers, as well as the South/Asian American youth vote.

According to the Youth Vote 2004 Fact Sheet released by CIRCLE, no other age group increased turnout by more than 5 percentage points. The 2004 campaign brought out the largest percentage of young voters in 32 years. Studies suggest that once a young person is involved in the political process, they are more likely to continue to be involved in it. 35.5 percent of 18- to 25-year-old Asian American citizens turned out to vote in 2004, the largest percentage since data started being collected in 1972. [link]

Couple of the big questions asked, and the ones I keep mulling over is, “What is civic engagement? What is political?” Though the traditional ideas are out there of voting and volunteering, there is a whole ‘alternative’ form of civic engagement that youth today take part in.

Back in our grandparents’ generation, being “political” meant you had to go to a rally or a protest, or join a union. Today’s youth has a whole new definition, according to this survey; 22 percent have worn a wristband, 36 percent have signed an online petition, and 30 percent have written an email or letter advocating a position. Eighteen percent have contributed to a political blog. i.e., 918,000 young people are “political bloggers,” which is fascinating since the blogs are a product of only the past few years. 34 percent of [college youth] say they turn to blogs [to get their news].[link]

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Pistachio Shells at Camp Echo

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Mahvish Khan has spent a lot of time at Guantanamo Bay lately. Born in 1978, Mahvish is the daughter of Pashtun Pakistani parents who met while in medical school in Peshawar. Mahvish is a US citizen, speaks Pashto, practices Islam, and studies law at the University of Miami.

It’s clearly been a heavy few years for the sister, and in response, she took a remarkably deep, courageous course of action. She found out which law firms were representing Guantanamo detainees, and pestered them to take her on as an assistant and interpreter. She found an interested firm and underwent a 6-month security check.

She’s now been to Guantanamo nine times. Her first-person account of visiting the detainees, published in Sunday’s Washington Post, is a beautiful, powerful piece of testimony, made all the more so by the poignancy of her cultural connection to the diminished men she found.

At 80, Haji Nusrat — detainee No. 1009 — is Guantanamo Bay’s oldest prisoner. A stroke 15 years ago left him partly paralyzed. He cannot stand up without assistance and hobbles to the bathroom behind a walker. Despite his paralysis, his swollen legs and feet are tightly cuffed and shackled to the floor. (…)
In the middle of our meeting, he says to me: ” Bachay .” My child. “Look at my white beard. They have brought me here with a white beard. I have done nothing at all. I have not said a single word against the Americans.” (…)
The old man looks at me. “You are a daughter to me,” he says. “Think of me as a father.” I nod, aligning and realigning pistachio shells on the table as I interpret.
As the meeting ends and we collect our things to go, the old man opens his arms to me and I embrace him. For several moments, he prays for me as Peter watches: “Insha’allah, God willing, you will find a home that makes you happy. Insha’allah, you will be a mother one day. . . . “

The sister is no romantic. She states her belief that the fifteen men her firm is representing are guilty of no wrong-doing, but she limits her claim to those men. She paints a subtle picture of life on the base, in which the U.S. soldiers are pleasant and welcoming. It’s a fascinating account of a place out of space and time, deliberately established and kept that way, sad, tragic and in no small measure absurd. Continue reading →

The Sadhu and the Shor Birds

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Hello again, Mutiny peeps! For this first post I’m going to get a little experimental, and hit you with an original short story (all borrowings are unconscious and unintentional, etc.). If it’s not to your taste, no problem; I will be regularly posting on more traditional bloggy topics. Incidentally, the following is part of a little series I’m doing — postmodern Sadhu stories; see another effort here.

Sadhu liked to sit on the porch of his son’s new house and write poetry, but lately he was finding it difficult. The problem was a group of noisy birds that lived in the trees behind their house. They gathered in the trees and bushes and seemed to do nothing but chatter, not in quiet, birdly chirps, but angry squawks. Most of the time Sadhu couldn’t even see the birds, as they seemed never to move from their respective perches in the trees, so merely sitting on the porch was a little like diving into a pit of greasy wrestlers. Sometimes this pleased the Sadhu, as it reminded him vaguely of India — the loud voices of the street hawkers arguing with customers over a few paise in his home town of Maramari. But he had heard that type of argument rarely since leaving India fifteen years ago, and now it had begun to seem abrasive and somewhat troubling. And anyway, that type of marketplace arguing usually ended in a sale, and the restoration of good will. But these birds squawked and squawked with an endless amount of stamina, which was almost mechanical in its regularity. Continue reading →

Permanent Bloggers: Amardeep Singh and Siddhartha Mitter

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I’ve been AWOL for the past few days on a big-time mission for Sepia Mutiny. I was tasked by the bunker-mates to try and sign Kaavya Viswanathan to a contract to blog for us here at SM. I even offered her a $500,000 advance and a TWO-month guest slot (as opposed to the standard one month) at our bunker. I know that she has never blogged before and is pretty young, but a team of monkeys in our basement were ready to help in “packaging” her stuff so that it would fit the tone and content of our website. Alas, I just couldn’t close the deal due to some legal issues.

There was no way I was going to come back empty handed however. As a back-up we made an offer to both Amardeep Singh and Siddhartha Mitter. Details of the contract? No advance, no movie deal, no Couric interview. Just disgruntled comment leavers and a shot at fomenting mutiny. They agreed only once we said we’d throw in a hair and make-up person (and put a star on their door). Just to be clear, if they end up plagiarizing we had nothing to do with it.

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One Night @ Bad Fiction Hell

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You may have heard of One Night @ the Call Center, an Indian novel attempting to ride the call center trend. It’s sold multitudinous copies and is being made into a movie. The script will be penned by the same author, an i-banker whose author’s voice brags about not being a writer.

He’s right. The story has an interesting premise, but it’s one of the worst-written books I’ve ever read, falling somewhere between bad high school love poem and sixth-grade book report. You’ll laugh out loud. The hilarity will be entirely unintentional.

The best review of a book this bad is to quote from it liberally. Enjoy the stank. Spoilers below.

~~~

The author writes groaners rivaling the one from Notting Hill:

‘Deep inside, I am just a girl who wants to be with her favorite boy. Because like you, this girl is a person who needs a lot of love.’

There are even more lines straight out of a Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest:

‘It is time to face the real world, even if it is harder and painful. I’d rather fly and crash, than just snuggle and sleep…’

‘Do you have a dark side, Shyam?’ … ‘I have so many–like half a dozen dark sides. I am like dark-sided hexagon [sic].’

Then he pats himself on back for minor-league wordplay:

‘Sorry, but calling is not my calling,’ Vroom said. I thought his last line was quite clever, but it wasn’t the right time to appreciate verbal tricks.

Telling, not showing — the author can’t write action, so he grasps at a voiceover:

‘We’re hanging above a hole, supported only by toothpicks. We’re screwed,’ Radhika said, summing up the situation for all of us.

Continue reading →

Quota killers

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A NYT report on the recent murders of 35 Hindus in Kashmir draws parallels to an infamous massacre of Sikh men six years ago:

Thirty five Hindus were killed in recent days in two separate incidents in the Indian-administered portion of the disputed Kashmir province… They are particularly worrisome because they are so plainly designed to fuel Hindu-Muslim tensions…

Killings targeting Hindu and Sikh villagers had become a routine form of terror some years ago when relations between India and Pakistan were at their worst. The most infamous of these massacres came in March 2000, on the eve of President Bill Clinton’s state visit to India, when 37 Sikhs were murdered in Chattisinghpora village… killings, blamed on both security forces and militants, have hardly vanished. [Link]

But it doesn’t get into the horrific fact that the perps are sometimes from the Indian army. An Indian government report issued last week says that after the Chattisinghpora massacre, Indian army personnel allegedly killed five innocent people in a fake encounter because they were trying to meet a quota for dead militants:

After three years of probe into the killing of innocent civilians on suspicion of being involved in Chattisinghpora massacre of 36 Sikhs in Jammu and Kashmir, the CBI indicted five army personnel for staging a fake encounter to kill the civilians…

The 18-page CBI chargesheet said that after the gunning down of Sikh community members, the army unit operating in the area was under “tremendous [psychological] pressure” to show results because there was allegation of inefficiency and ineffectiveness on their part.

The CBI alleged the army personnel entered into a criminal conspiracy to pick up the some innocent persons and stage-manage an encounter to create the impression that the militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora killings had been neutralised. The accused army men also showed fake recovery of arms and ammunition from the five deceased after obtaining signatures of two witnesses on blank papers. [Link]

And in a protest after these staged killings, nine more civilians were killed by live fire. There’s an old saying in business: be careful in choosing what to measure. In the former USSR, numerical quotas alone led to shoddy quality. In this case, a poorly-thought-out work quota, combined with other, more significant factors, may have contributed to egregious civilian murders by the state.

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Kudos a Todos

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In today’s NYT online, an article by Tom Zeller called In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice begins:

WRITING last Monday at SepiaMutiny.com, a Web log dedicated to the Southeast Asian [sic] diaspora, a user called RC declared that “there is no scientific way to compare works of literature.” [Link]

Hopefully, I don’t sound like the TOI quoting the Harvard Independent (not even Harvard’s main daily) quoting the TOI I believe this is the first time that I’ve seen the Grey Lady use Sepia Mutiny in a leadoff quote, with a link and everything. I was so excited that I forgave the author his confusion between “South Asian” and “SouthEast Asian” (to be fair, my Mom has been known to do that too …)

SM is quoted again in the middle of the article, with the quote taking up the entire fifth paragraph:

“Viswanathan might have plagiarism issues with more than McCafferty’s books,” wrote Janak Ramakrishnan, another blogger [sic] at Sepia Mutiny. Mr. Ramakrishnan had noticed a similarity between pious aphorisms scribbled onto posters by a character in Ms. Viswanathan’s book (“If from drink you get your thrill, take precaution, write your will” and “All the dangerous drug abusers end up safe as total losers”) and passages from the 1990 book “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” by Salman Rushdie. A chapter titled “The Mail Coach” in Mr. Rushdie’s book depicts a series of rhyming road signs, including two that read, “If from speed you get your thrill, take precaution, make your will” and “All the dangerous overtakers end up safe at the undertaker’s.” [Link]

Again, I was so excited about the extended quote that I forgave the author his confusion between bloggers (those on the masthead) and commenters – the rest of the mutiny family writing large. As a matter of fact, I think this is the first time I’ve seen SM quoted by the MSM in a situation where all of the quotes were taken from readers, and none from the MastheadMutineers. As all of you out there in cyberia know, it takes a village to raze a topic, and so I wanted to say thank you to you all. Without your efforts the Mutiny would literally not have been quoted.

Continue reading →