No Man is an Island

"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all"

-Zora Neale Hurston


Today was a difficult day. I had been warned that as a tall black woman I would stand out on the streets of Delhi. The first time I heard this, I shrugged. I remember tossing back somethingly typically cavalier--along the lines of :

"Oh, please I get stared at Zabar's. I can handle it."

That is still true. Growing up in an affluent section of Long Island I have a long history of stares preceding taunting, threats, and other forms of aggression. Even without stares--I have I have pretended not to notice when every rickshaw or cab driver cranes his neck to peek in our car window as we pass by. But the past few days have been difficult--and the pressure is beginning to build on me. Unfortunately, I am used to being the only one "like me". Let me be more specific, I am used to fighting back against the negative attention that that scenario usually accompanies. I have been overwhelmed by the attention I've received, but what is more troubling is the fact that I don't know what meaning is behind it. To put this in context--this is a country where the repression and even at time the existence of caste-based violence is repressed. Although the global press rarely if ever comments on this, the Dalit are the target of systematic violence throughout the country. The conferences we have attended over the past few days have been small and sponsored by activists, many of them Dalit themselves with several female attendees. Today's conference, however, featured a large and almost exclusively male and presumably non-Dalit audience. When Noopur and I entered the room, our relative height made us stand out, as well as my features, something I was becoming increasingly aware of. It had been this afternoon when a man from a group sitting next to me during lunch turned to me and asked with hushed fascination

"Excuse me, where are you from?"

My own reaction surprised me when I felt my the corners of my mouth curl up before I simply said, "The United States." The issue of my identity, as the child of Nigerian immigrants, often presents a different picture of the "blackness" than that which people have come to expect and usually presents a presumption of my not belonging in a particular space. Yet instead of the weary indignation this comment usually musters, the sheepishness of the question made me smile. In that instance I could be sure that it was a question that was purely innocent. In today's conference I was not as sure.

It was the sort of experience that crystalized my reasons for coming to India. Moving through this envronment has triggered all the defenses I had erected to deal with rascism in the past. So what was disturbing today was not the attention I received, but it was the fact that I had no idea what the intentions were and had no way to react to it. Several reactions followed--fear, anger and mostly sadness--all of which left me confused.

I put the quote above to ask myself the following question:

If being the "other" is a neutral term, what about that type of alienation is so negative? I invite your responses. Thank you