Rapti Siriwardane, 1 March, 2020
First published in Medium, with the same title.
Because I am tired of seeing most things through the prism of race and privilege.
You could say I grew up in a rather sheltered stable.
My childhood in Abu Dhabi was whitewashed by a series of British international schools. In the early 80s, you only had two cultural variants: the American and the British. The former was deemed to be far superior. To be normal was to be unrelentingly Anglophone — irrespective of name, skin tone, and ‘biracial’ markings.
Many of us were diplomatic, corporate, academic, or military brats. These days we might be called Third Culture Kids (TCKs). Many of our teachers, counsellors, and nurses came from diverse corners of the world. Thinking back, I cannot recall if I ever intentionally blotted out racially-tinged microaggressions — intentional or unwitting at the time — however subtle.
I suppose I felt smug and safe in my intergenerationally inherited Ceylonese/Lankan Anglophoneness. At times, that was my loss.
Becoming a blotter
At age five, at seven, or eleven, I would have liked to believe that socio-cultural and racialized stereotypes were barely a part of my world. Unlike those friends of colour whom I later met in life (women and men who had primarily grown up in white normative spaces in the 80s and 90s), I never suffered the slow pain of wincing when a new teacher haphazardly spat out an ‘exotic’ name on a class register.
What normalized us at an international school were our surface-level variances. Variances that were otherwise fashioned into culturally uniformity, irrespective of whether you were Egyptian, Polish, Nigerian, Taiwanese, or Italian. Irrefutably, international schools in the 1980s were still spaces of privilege.
At home, racial prejudice and cultural hierarchy were never themes that my folks discussed. Sure, there was talk of grand politics vis-à-vis current affairs, but we barely touched on the micro-political and the mundane that might pattern personal experience (cf. Mehra, 2019). And so I skipped through a good part of my formative years being somewhat unreflexive. I was a blotter, while having normalized the whiteness I witnessed in Euro-American media, and the world around me. These were the late 1980s, a time that also marked the final years of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall crumbled.
Fast forward: I left home at 19, after high-school and a gap year. These last 20 years have been spent in Southeast Asia (the Malay-Indonesian archipelago) and in Europe. I temporarily made Germany my base, knowing all too well that I would still carry away a bit of those regional Rheinisch and Frisian German sensibilities, like I did with all the other places I homed and called myself ‘local’ in — England, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.
I say ‘temporarily’ because I often felt like a leaf in the wind, measuring life stages by place, never feeling that I really belonged anywhere, not even in Colombo where I completed the last few years of high school. I knew all too well that I would soon leave the island to begin life as an undergrad. Indeed, this peculiar and somewhat insular longing for belonging is an entirely different (although related) theme that deserves to be addressed on its own.
I often wondered when I started de-blotting those moments that were flecked with deep uncertainty and a mild sense of anguish at meeting new people. It became a sensibility I was barely conscious of at time, often figuring how best to navigate a conversational terrain that might otherwise leave me with a sense of alienation, shame-tinged self-pity (at not lashing out?), or outright anger and resentment.
If I had to lay down those encounters like one by one, like a pile of cards, they would neatly stack up, for the most part, in two places I have collectively spent most my years in. These countries are Singapore and Germany, as culturally and historically different they may seem.
Connecting the dots
When does racialized wounding happen, and what does it entail? At the level of event, it appears subjectively insightful, and as “a site of racial injury” (Cheng, 2000). If you consider ‘wounding’ as an active verb, it becomes processual. It takes on the quality of a recurring act, and a learned psycho-social practice that patterns our everyday experience, perception, and the ways in which we move through the world. Racial wounding is not merely a cumulative series of one-off encounters. They arguably pile up, building upon the other, remaking future encounters weightier and emotionally searing.
In my case, those moments at de-blotting were often crass and barely subtle in their suggestions, like when:
- at a formal office dinner party in Singapore, the line manager of the partner I was with at the time (who was of Balkan descent), very sweetly remarked how lucky I was to have him, that our ‘mixed’ progeny would most likely inherit his pale eastern European hues instead (she was a British-educated self-labelled Chinese-Malaysian, with a doctorate in Biology);
- I am often asked (mostly my white people) why I’m married or partnered, and whether this makes me a veritable social outcast in the eyes of ‘my people’ because heaven forbid, all South Asian women are forced into some kind of relationship aren’t they? A grand one indeed, and the last puzzling ironically came from a pair of Swiss nationals whose mothers, probably never imagined they would ever get the chance of an electoral vote;
- A guy I once met, a straight-laced German musicology professor specializing in 20s jazz and early civil rights who asked me if my parents “spoke English as well as I did…”
- I often found myself blenching at snide comments incessantly made by two superiors, both white female professors, as they picked at my ‘Oxford accent’ (crass as it was, because Oxonian accents hardly live on at contemporary Oxford to begin with).
The list goes on, but you get the picture.
Ultimately, the armor that you nurture evolves out of a deep sense of shame. Not the shame of being conflated and stereotyped, but of not having had the spunk to speak out elegantly, and to lash back with all the curated comebacks you could have possibly imagined. The armor itself was beautifully crafted, pieced together with well-rehearsed refrains: of cultural ignorance (shame-on-you, the culturally illiterate), of colonial in/exheritance (deeper shaming, signalling the poverty of someone’s own education and cultural capital)….
Wounding and armouring go hand-in-hand. Tellingly, the latter exists as a survival strategy, making you feel momentarily better.
But what this un/easy cycle conceals is how blinkered and myopic you potentially become when those wounds are allowed to go unchecked, and the armour sits on you gleaming yet heavy, well-oiled and ready for another skirmish.
Making peace — with the intention to heal
It remains an uneasy thought: why should you bear the wounds and the battle scars of skirmishes that were never your choice? You might think through a myriad injustices: the injustice of having to educate others (of their own privilege); the injustice of having to bear the weight of that emotional labour; the injustice of having to heal yourself, by your own wits (the same wits that armoured you up); the injustice of lacking the wherewithal to spring-clean and come to terms with the past, dig up all those little slurs and microaggressions that piled over 38 years.
Yet, these are encounters that invariably seeped into your muscle memory, your cellular structure, and your energetic field. Not to mention those ancestral wounds.
Indeed, a part of me still squirms at the thought: Why heal, as an act of defeat? Because making oneself vulnerable in fighting the injustices of such a trauma seem counter-intuitive, almost suicidal.
Yet if you look at healing as the art of unravelling, the injustice of it all slowly dissipates. As Mandela poignantly put it, hate offers up its own internal wound, a wound that festers and slowly poisons. The armouring might seem like a salve at first. But as slurs go, the armouring is but skin-deep and it does nothing to arrest the underlying patterns of shame, self-pity, and social resentment that offers up a world in black and white.
What if your first step was more self-forgiving? Start with being restful in the truth — telling yourself, indeed you might feel misunderstood, undervalued, invisible. Rationalizing why becomes yet another trick of the mind, a never-ending story. But it does not have to stop there. Healing starts by acknowledging your own demons — the knee-jerk reactions you learned over the years of negating the very images and prejudices that conflated and ‘othered’ you, turned you against anything else (i.e. I am not them).
Healing starts by naming those wounds that re-emerge like a hydra-headed serpent. I pen this piece during the COVID-19 pandemic, recalling an Asian-American colleague writing to me saying, “it´s like SARS all over again, and it boils down to just one thing — Asians eat weird things — it makes me so angry all over again.”
That is a bleeding wound, and time is no healer of racialized scars.
While healing is feeling and intentional shadow work, it is also unlearning and peeling away. It calls for de-armoring with awareness, making you cognizant of people´s own inadvertent blindspots, and in ways that attune you to their own their lack of exposure. It is not about letting things off easily, or having something slip by unnoticed, but in donning a different kind of armour, finding solace through humour, forgiving ignorance in a way that opens safe spaces for inclusive storytelling.
We all, in some ways feel, think, and re-imagine in categories. That does not mean that it is our business to educate the world into being more transculturally literate. Yet categories are self-producing entities, because racializations create powerful counter-acts that superficially work by means of justifying other, newer categories.
My categories, and yours. For it is often the resistant, hybrid wounds that ooze the most.
My heartfelt thanks to Dhivya Sivanesan. Thank you for the conversations that inspired this piece in the end, and for perceptively coining the term “brown wound.”
References
Cheng, A.A. (2000). The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Mehra, N.J. (2019). Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion, Picador Press.