Generalising

Question, not necessarily needing answer. Is Chak De! India a feminist film?

For those unlucky, unlucky people who haven’t seen it: it’s the archetypical sports film, charting the rise of the team of no-hopers to international champions, with the unusual characteristic that the team in question is the Indian women’s national hockey team. (Field hockey is India’s national sport. Don’t pretend to be unsurprised.)

Also, it’s pretty fantastic. I watched it again recently and Andrew ended up drawing up a chair so he could read the subtitles, and we cheered and groaned in the right places. I highly recommend this vid as a much better introduction to it, and, in fact, a just a brilliant vid in general. I’ve recommended it before, it’s fabulous.

And on the face of it, it ought to be a feminist film. It’s a film about women’s success, after all – women succeeding at something together. It passes the Bechdel test in every scene. It’s about power, and how to find it. The problem, though, is that the main protagonist is not one of the women – he’s their coach, Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan, who else), who’s coaching them after, years before, having been accused of throwing an India v. Pakistan match, and their success redeems him. And nowhere is it more obvious that it’s his story is the fact the film begins and ends with him – the women have their individual arcs, but these are resolved, literally, over the credits – the closing shot of the film is of Khan returning to his childhood home.

And further, the individual arcs of the women are not always given the attention they deserve, either. While they all have stories, it’s notable that the ones that get the most time are Vidya, Preeti, and Bindia, the three middle-class city girls. Which isn’t to say their stories don’t have feminist undercurrents – I absolutely love that the film doesn’t, for a second, avoid the point that these women’s families think their dedication to their sport makes them unmarriagable, and doesn’t avoid the choices they have to make.

But I wanted more about Soimoi, a woman from Jharkhand whose Hindi is limited and English non-existent, who gets called junglee by the others, and about Mary and Molly, Christians from the north-east who get called “foreign” rather than Indian. My favourite is Komal, who is tiny and determined (hey, guess why I love her), and is going to play hockey rather than get married. What I mean to say is, all the dynamics of bias other than gender are right there for you to see, it is in no way a perfect film.

But at the same time… I suspect to analyse this film from a Western feminist perspective is interesting but not helpful. This is India we’re talking about – India, and Indians, and it’s this post that reminded me today of Chak De! India, this is the country where a woman needs a broken mirror to go and see a film.

Which brings me to the point of all of this, really: that scene, That notorious scene, near the beginning of the film, which I remember everyone talking about when the film was first released, some in disgust, but most with a quiet understated glee. Simply put: a man makes a crude remark at a professional female athlete in public. She ignores him. He tries it on again. She tries harder to ignore him. Her friend, also a professional athlete, loses her temper and punches him in the face. He gets pissed off and calls over his friends. And then fifteen other professional athletes punch him in the face.

Look, watch it.

(My apologies – I couldn’t find a subtitled version. The only dialogue you really need, though, is the bit where SRK is holding the guy with the cricket bat against the wall – he’s telling him he’s a bastard and not to hit people from behind.)

And okay, I do not think violence is the answer, and this is a fantasy. But I defy you not to enjoy it. I really do. And that goes for the film as a whole – which, for all its failings, is about brown women being awesome. And, you know, I am okay with that.

Just in case we wimminz hadn’t got the message yet, today’s xkcd sets it out for us:

The “typical internet user” has a penis.

Like, obv.

I am not a great fan of salads as actual meals. In my view, a salad counts towards your daily calorific intake the way oxygen does, and I probably consume them both with the same enthusiasm.

(And while I’m here, a quick thought. Nightline, that bastion of journalism, did a televised debate about whether it’s “okay” to be fat. Er. Anyway, anti-obesity activist MeMe Roth said this:

“We’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we’re behaviorally and neurochemically dependent upon food.”

Seriously. Seriously, she actually said that. Dependent on food. Like, I am so dependent on food, I can’t go a whole day without a fix of it. Sometimes my physical and emotional health suffers because I haven’t had any!

…ah, you get it. That people can actually say things like that – yeah. This comes entirely courtesy of Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose, which, for what it’s worth, is one of my favourite feminist blogs out there. I’m not much of a fat activist – to my sorrow and exceedingly large dollop of privilege, I pretty much resemble the societal ideal for how women should look in terms of body shape, only shorter, smaller breasts and a bit too brown – but certainly I agree with the central tenet that the media preoccupation with obesity, and body size, and the purported health dangers of the former, is not value-neutral science but comes with its own assumptions and prejudices. At its worst, it’s a well-disguised way to damage women, to make them sweat and obsess over their bodies, to drive them to constant distraction as a means by which they can be controlled. (Hey, the population is fifty-one percent women, the patriarchy can’t be everywhere.)

And more than fat acceptance, Kate Harding writes well about feminism, really well – unlike the mainstream blogs, she doesn’t tolerate racism, ableism, or in the case of Feministing a couple of days ago, just plain information fail. Consider this a rec.

This was going to be a recipe, wasn’t it? Normally I don’t approve as salads as main courses. Normally. But this one has lots of protein, and is tasty, and just about passes muster if you weren’t that hungry to start with. And, hey, it is tasty and you can always have some cake after.

You need:

-one large pepper, preferably red;
-handfuls of rocket, or baby spinach, or both, or anything else green and leafy;
-feta cheese, about 100g;
-a couple of slices of good ham;
-cherry tomatoes, a few;
-pine nuts or sunflower seeds or both;
-a small red onion or half a big one;
-nice olive oil.

De-seed the pepper, chop into rough chunks, halve the cherry tomatoes, cut the onion into slices. Put them all in a baking tray, douse well with lots of the nice olive oil, stick them in the oven at 180 degrees Centigrade for twenty minutes. (You’re not trying to roast them properly – just till the onion is edible and the tomatoes a bit squishy.)

Cut the feta cheese into chunks and crumble those into a big bowl. Rip the ham into small strips, and after the twenty minutes, add the ham to the baking tray and put it back in the oven for another five minutes, until the ham is curling at the edges.

Then, pour the contents of the tray into the bowl with the feta, mix well and be sure all the oil gets into the bowl, it’s lovely. Stir well, pour in some pine nuts or sunflower seeds, add handfuls of rocket or spinach, keep stirring until it’s alll mixed. Presto, done. And have some cake afterwards for the carbohydrate.

I have just discovered a new blog: Geek Feminism. What a fabulous idea, sayeth I – it’s a great mish-mash of women in science, women in engineering, women in Star Trek fandom, women in all of those and more, and how their experiences are different from men’s experience, and how geek culture can be viewed through feminist eyes.

I’ve been reading back through the archives, and just read this post: On geekitude, hierarchy and being a snob. It’s a interesting post in itself, and worth reading, but there’s an insight in it that I don’t think the author gives the weight it deserves, so I’m going to talk about it. It goes like this:

I think that what I do is easy. Simple as falling off a log. Anyone could do it. Yeah, I know a lot of things that allow me to do what I do, but they’re just things you could learn if you took the time.

Now the eagle-eyed among you can spot imposter syndrome a mile off, and while I know in a vague intellectual sense that I must be at least competent at what I do – otherwise, why would universities have admitted me to study it and organisations have employed me to do it? – it’s an astonishingly hard thing to internalise. And particularly, particularly for women. Women who are told all the time that math is hard, and that excellence is not for them.

Now it is true that if you knew what I knew, if you had read the same books, you’d realise how easy some of my daily tasks are. But, notes the author, but an expert also confidently says, “No. That’s far harder than you realize.”

I’ve never thought of that before. But I know when someone says something about my field – usually, “But why don’t you just sue them?” or “But surely that’s illegal?” – that is patently stupid. I can prove the negative. And I can know something because of my feel for what I do – because of my abilities, training and instincts, and not (just) because I’ve read a lot of textbooks.

So maybe I’m not terrible at what I do. Maybe I’m as good at it as the rest of the world thinks I am. And if I am, imposter of imposters, maybe you are too.

I am a native Hindi speaker.

This is both factually accurate and entirely misleading. My parents are native Hindi speakers (well, one has it for a mother tongue and the other has it almost), and until I was five I spoke nothing else. Then, of course, the usual story – I learnt English fast, it displaced my Hindi almost as fast, pretty soon I was speaking English at home, etc., etc.

Nowadays I’m luckier than some and I haven’t forgotten it entirely, but my grammar is shaky and my vocabulary more so, and in a lot of ways it’s stalled at the five-year-old level. (I suspect this would have changed if I’d been educated in the language, but of course I wasn’t. I have at some point or another been formally taught English, French, Spanish, Italian, Welsh and Latin, but not a word in my original tongue.)

I learned how to read and write Devanagari script around ten years ago, and while it’s also at a five-year-old level, it means I can at least muddle my way through a dictionary. I have therefore decided that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, and am going to use the dictionary to Learn Words. They are going to be Excitin’ Words. (In all seriousness – I lack the vocabulary, in Hindi, to function as an adult. “Water”, “sleep”, “house”, “tree”, “cold” – I’m fine with those. “Law”, “government”, “engineering”, “history” – any abstract noun or two-syllable adjective is beyond me. How do you address a lack this significant? By picking pages at random out of the dictionary!)

Today’s words:

लघुगणक (laghuganak) – “logarithm”. Why anyone would ever need this in conversation is beyond me, but that is what the dictionary provides. (So does Wikipedia!)

रदर्शनी (radarshan) – “fair”, as in a World’s Fair or expo. A fair that you go to eat candy-floss at is a mela, मेला.

मछली की जनता (machli ki junta) – which is not three words, and may not even be right. In my defence, “shoal” is one word in the English half of the dictionary, and one does often refer to shoals of fish is one is in the habit of discussing such things. However, in Hindi we apparently use a construction that translates to “the general public of fish”.

…I don’t even know. But, look, I learned words today! I shall update as and when I learn more.

(Also, one day I will learn IAST transliteration, but today is not that day. Please bear with me.)

This is a collection of short stories: four or five stand-alones, and then three connected stories at the end that together are about novella-length.

On the whole, this is very familiar territory. Believe me, I wrote that sentence intending no pun whatsoever; the “unaccustomed earth” of the title is the immigrant’s land, both a new world and the New World, and in Lahiri’s case, it is invariably Boston and New England. Her immigrants arrive on the eastern seaboard from Calcutta, another coastal city, and they speak Bengali, and they become professors at Harvard and MIT. They are simply, evocatively depicted, the details of their lives lovingly and, in my limited experience of the same narrative, accurately rendered. Lahiri’s style is always, always engaging, the simplicity of it turning from mundanity to devastation in a quiet sequence of sentences.

And each story is, alone, both lovely and deeply affecting – the title story gives us a young mother being visited by her father after some time apart, and how he plants her a garden; “Only Goodness” is an unflinching look at how easy it is to destroy a family; the linked Hema and Kaushik stories track a son’s life after his mother dies young – but it’s taken all together that they start to worry me. These familes, their stories, they have two things in common: they are immigrants from India, settling themselves down on that unaccustomed earth, and they are unhappy. Each story has that awful, echoing, hollow sense of loss, with time taken over the lines and caverns of that empty space, care taken to describe the ubiquity of that despair. Here is what worries me. Lahiri’s protagonists marry in her stories, some in arranged marriages, some marrying white Americans, and all are loveless and unloved. Some lose their families to death and to distance, and there is no redemption for them, either. There is always a sense that something, somewhere, is irreparably breaking. I ask not for the saccharine happy ending, but for the notion, however obliquely expressed, that there is hope for the Indian disaspora, that all is not lost at the moment of leaving – and this is not something I can find, here.

Perhaps it really is the author’s opinion, that the immigrant experience is fundamentally a heartbreak, and in that case this is an honest book – but it is neither happy, nor hopeful, and I hope that it is not true.

This is a better book than A Long Way Down. Admittedly, every book ever published is probably better than A Long Way Down. This is quite a good book.

To put it another way – well, I have read all of Hornby’s novels save Slam, which suggests I’m a fan, doesn’t it? I read the first three in a breathless teenage rush, thinking grand thoughts about transformative and meaningful and zeitgeist, and then I read How To Be Good much much later, and changed my mind with almost the same rapidity. Hornby writes well, but I rather think he thinks too much of himself, tries too hard to be both funny and profound, and it comes across as forced, particularly the grand-hollowness-at-the-centre-of-middle-class-existence schtick. His characters certainly do suffer from that sort of hollowness, but that’s because they’re characters in a Hornby novel and not real people. Nowhere does this manifest more than in A Long Way Down, which has a wonderful idea at its heart, and an excellent first few chapters, and then quickly becomes a plotless, heartless mess.

So I wasn’t surprised to pick up Juliet, Naked and find myself thoroughly enjoying the first couple of chapters, but I was more surprised when I carried on enjoying it after that. The plot centres around Annie, a middle-aged woman living in a northern seaside town, and her live-in boyfriend of fifteen years, Duncan the feckless nerd. Duncan has been obsessed for a decade with one obscure, reclusive singer-songwriter, Tucker Crowe; when he releases a new album and it’s not that good, Annie suddenly realises she wants out. Having wasted fifteen years of your life, though, is not something you can throw off in a hurry; somewhere in the American Midwest, Tucker is thinking the same thing.

And that’s…. it, really. Hornby isn’t good at plots, but here he works that to a positive advantage, taking his time over the very simple progression of events, and taking pleasure in getting you to like Annie and loathe Duncan a little bit. (He’s a little bit of a caricature, but not much of one; I certainly admit to having met this particular kind of obsessive, strident, hiding-in-internet fan.) And Tucker, too, is drawn well, likeable even if his interior monologue does seem to contain a lot of faux-profundity, and all the supporting cast have their time in the sun, too.

In the end, it’s a little bit of a fairytale. I suspect it’s not supposed to be one. I suspect it’s meant to be a savage attack on middle-aged loneliness and the evils of the internet, or else a maundering on the ways in which people waste their lives. It’s meant to be depressing. But, you know, it’s not the nineties any more, and this is a nice little book about some people falling in love.

“I was born twice.” It’s an epic beginning for a novel, which is in itself epic in its twists and turns. Middlesex is the story of Cal Stephanides, a forty-year-old man who was born a girl called Callope; at the age of sixteen, his hermaphroditism was discovered. A second birth, as he explains it, and a large chunk of the novel is the story of Calliope’s trials and tribulations as she’s socialised into a gender that doesn’t quite fit.

But to get to that point, we have the story of the previous two generations of the Stephanides family, Greek-Americans living in Detroit by way of a tiny village in Asia Minor. It’s also the story of how Cal came to have the requisite genetic condition and surrounding circumstances for such a transformation. It’s a long story, entwined with a great deal of history: the Turks’ burning of Smyrna, the Second World War, the 1967 race riots, the Nation of Islam, all forming a backdrop and context to the family’s story. They move through the burning of the harbour, speakeasies and hot dog stands, moving to the suburbs, and I recognise the greater narrative, the story of an immigrant family and their identity, their homesickness and their difference, their gradual assmilation, and finally, their loss of what’s left behind.

There are discordant notes in this grand tapestry, of course – sometimes the inner life of the teenage girl isn’t particularly well rendered, and occasionally things get a little too soap-operatic – but on the whole, it’s an achievement. I could have done with a little more about Cal’s life post-”second birth”, actually – a little more on how he deals with a life lived male, and how he deals with the family secrets he inherits, but as it is, it’s a substantial, solid achievement – a warm bath of a novel, just the right level of comedic, and full of insight into identity.

In the winter of 1939, Josef Kavalier stumbles into his cousin Sammy’s cramped bedroom in New York City, having escaped from Nazi-occupied Prague. They share a cigarette, and something begins: a friendship, and a partnership,that will last years. Between them they create the Escapist, a superhero who can escape from anyone and anything, who travels the world as an agent of the League of the Golden Key, helping others to escape from oppression and tyranny.

The theme could be predictable and hamfisted: in America, Josef becomes Joe, and Sammy Klayman has already become Sam Clay; they escape from their Jewish backgrounds into the mainstream American middle classes just as Joe has already escaped Prague. But escape in itself isn’t the only theme – it’s also the failures that surround it, the way Joe and Sammy, in a way very reminscent of Angels in America, fail to be anything but their Jewish, troubled selves. Sammy can’t escape from his own sexuality, Joe can’t escape from anything he’s left behind. And as a counterpoint to the escapes, there are the absences left behind: the absence of Sammy’s father, Joe living with the daily absence of his family, and later, the absence of Joe.

The language is lyrical and indulgently expansive, the moods perfectly evoked, but interestingly, there is nevertheless an appopriate comic-book aspect to the way the novel is written: events have a ka-pow! quality, especially in the earlier part of the novel. Joe bounces through a young lady’s window, to screaming, Sammy kisses his his first love on the roof of a building with thunderstorms exploding around them, and later, Joe’s adventures in the Antarctic cold, complete with grim madmen and sudden death have the overblown comic-book feel.

What to say, in the end? I wasn’t sure what to take away from this novel. It is too heavy and sad to read once, but there’s something beautiful and altering in it, and something compelling about the way history and religion are threaded masterfully throughout. It stays with you, with all its weight.

Easy as pie, this one, but surprisingly nice.

Ingredients:
-three sausages, good ones – I used pork and caramelised onion;
-one baking apple;
-one red onion;
-olive oil;
-honey.

Peel and chop the apple into rough chunks and throw into a deep baking tray. Add the onion, chopped into fair-sized chunks (not slices). Toss with olive oil, and stir some honey through it all. Put in the oven at 180 degrees Centigrade for twenty-five minutes.

In the meantime, grill or fry the sausages – I recommend grilling, because this is already a fairly oily mix. When done, the apple and onion ought to be done as well (check to see the apple is soft enough to turn into goo in your mouth). Chop the sausage into bitesized pieces, toss in a bowl with the apple and onions, mix well and add a sprig of parsley if you’re feeling decadent. Done.

This is enough for one hungry person, but it scales perfectly – just double everything. It really is rather nice.