::To Stir Things Up: What Are the Stakes of Engaging In Memoir-Writing::

As a graduate student, I taught a class called Rhetoric of Slavery. We did an unit on early twentieth century black artists-- Paul Robeson, Odetta and many many others-- recording Negro Spirituals. I would photocopy the lyrics of the song "No More Auction Blocks" for my students and we would read it together, as a poem. I would ask my students, what, according to them, is the guiding emotion of this poem. Almost unanimously they would say, anger. Then, I would make them listen to Paul Robeson's rendition of it. And would ask them the same question. This time, too, almost unanimously, they would say, sadness. I would then land the class into a discussion of "masking" as one of the salient features of African Diasporic cultural productions. I would also introduce them to excerpts of Houston Baker's work on the subject.

And, as I began to go further into my own writing, I recognized, I have used masking and other instruments of opacity all my life. These tools were necessary for me to survive as a woman in India, and as a woman of color, a racialized subject, in USA. I have a problem in revealing myself. I take years to reveal myself to people around me. I withdraw from situations which demand that I make myself more transparent. There are definitely exceptions, but this has more or less been my strategy to survive in this world.

In my defense, I don't think an effort to be fully "transparent" on my part would have lead to any more transparency than my self-consciously opaque efforts have. For one thing, most Americans find it hard to understand the subject positions I have occupied long before I came to America. A feminist? In India? Is there such a thing? Leftist? Wow, are there leftists in India? I can keep on adding to that list. In the same way, who I am, politically and personally, makes it hard to understand me in Indian artistic and political circles too. So, even if I write/talk  about everything I am doing during the course of a day--- how many glasses of water I am drinking, who I am fucking (or not), how many times I call my parents (or don't), the consistency of my shit--- these things aren't going to make me any more transparent than I already am. And, I don't think it's just about me. "Transparency" and "opacity" are political, sociological, cultural and historical concepts. Like any such concepts and processes, who is opaque or transparent to who, during a particular historical moment, is decided by a plethora of factors.
But, the point I am trying to make here is, opacity is a political tool that has been used by racial, sexual, gender and other kinds of minorities to construct a sense of self that is not easily reducible to the dominant social gaze. In a poem I wrote couple of years back, I tried to address this:

I took the matter of being good a little too seriously: I didn't demand things. I was eager to agree.
Reluctant to say no. Rarely argued.
When I did, I apologized too quickly. I didn't believe I could finish anything. I refrained from fighting.
Instead, I lied. Why shouldn't I.
Hands and legs walked around me, in circles, went to work, typed letters, fell asleep —they liked those lies better.
Relieved that they wouldn't
have to excavate the ruins with their own fingernails.

When  I wrote these lines, I was thinking, how in the world in which I grew up, young people, especially girls lied. They lied about going to a movie, they lied about staying out late, they lied about almost everything they did. Yes, this was part of the strategies these young people used to create a world for themselves beyond the adult and familial supervision and gaze. In this, lying in this context can very much be called a form of resistance. But, at the same time, there is something non-confrontational about this strategy. It never really questioned or tried to change the status quo too much, but merely carved out a space for one's own self within the established status quo. And it worked. It has worked for generations, so to speak. But then, no power structure is radically changed without head-on and outright confrontation. So, in any society, whether it's India or America or South Africa or any other space, human beings attempt to come out of that space of opacity and try to face things as they are. But, that's a different question. Maybe I will write a different post about it on some other day.

What is important, in the case of my own development as a writer is that, having grown up in such a climate, and having used these tools of opacity all my life, I was afraid of memoirs as a genre. Everything I have written so far, is intensely personal. But I have also veered towards fiction in my poems, because that's what poems are all about. I have no truth claims to make about my poems. In my poems, fiction and nonfiction rub shoulders in a way that it is difficult for me to distinguish. But, that's not how it works in a memoir. A memoir, unlike a poem or a work of fiction, survives on a truth claim.

And I am afraid of such truth claims. I am not willing to make myself vulnerable in that way. There are lots of things I find problematic in our contemporary fetishization of memoirs, but that's not what I am concerned about here. I haven't written non-fiction pieces so far because I was afraid of them. I wasn't willing to let go of the very strategy which has let me survive all through these years.

But then, I was also intent on growing as a writer. And one of the New Year's resolution I made during the month of January in 2013 was to take a workshop in a genre that is neither poetry nor fiction. To honor that resolution, I signed up for Marianne Villanueva's class on Creative Non-Fiction at UCLA Extension. I have just finished it yesterday, and am still processing it. But, this post is to let the world know that I have dealt with one of my writerly fears. What I have learnt from the class is going to be a separate post. This is just the preface.