thought it was a bird it was just a paper bag

[raven]

Why, why, why do I SUCK SO MUCH? I have been writing this essay since half past nine. It is now almost five in the morning and I have only written 1,993 words, and every single one of those is terrible and awful. I can't write tonight. Nothing fits together, though it should, and my ghastly tute-partner wrote something stupid like four thousand words. I apparently just suck beyond the telling of it.

Claire is writing about Domitian, and Ben about optics, and the three of us are sinking into a weird twilight zone all together in a sort of co-dependent gestalt mess. Funny how exhaustion makes you psychic, or at least puts you in the comfortable, vaguely terrifying place where you can communicate without speech, because when you do talk the conversation goes around in ever-decreasing circles.

Also. Also, sleep would be, you know. Good. Quite good, anyway. It's not like I've been fantasising about a whole night's sleep for a week now. Also I have the vicious spitting rage that comes with no sleep in, like, ever. Everything makes me very angry. (Sort of like omg-I-will-not-be-reasonable-I-will-break-all-your-fingers hopping furious.) Mostly I make me angry, because OH MY GOD HOW IS THIS ESSAY NOT FINISHED YET I AM GOING MAD. Claire has been reading me Nero-to-Hadrian Roman poetry, which is worse than Vogon poetry. A Roman poet called Statius wrote some quite horrific Odes to Vespasian and to Roman Roads and to Giant Equestrian Statues, and they are all awful. My favourite is the Ode to Marcellus, which begins something like "curre per Euboicos, epistula" and features Statius addressing a letter. No, addressing it. As in, "O, Letter!"

Several stanzas later, they had to scrape me off the floor.

Several hours later, I was sufficiently crazy to be eating sugar straight out of the jar again, and Claire was chewing absent-mindedly on a ciabatta - why do essays always engender the eating of everything in sight? - and Sky came in and talked about Tony Blair for a while, and about his essay for a while, and we all talked about when Tony Blair got into office. (I remember. I was ten. Pedar picked me up and danced around the room with me.) He's ill - Sky, not Tony Blair - and has given flu to Claire, and now to Ben, who is reacting by demanding sugar on toast at every possible opportunity.

Perhaps we are all going mad. Sky noticed the sugar and the ciabatta, and Ben rooting for linctus, and remarked, "This is such a bizarre household," before sauntering off out again.

"But at least we've got a household," I muttered, with the petulant spitting rage, to a general consensus.

ALSO. There is a man whose articles I am trying to read, and he wrote something about Indian politics, something about, "this also includes minority groups, including Dalits and women."

OMG. I am not a minority. WE ARE NOT A MINORITY. There are five hundred million of us. Of all the people on earth, one in twelve is an Indian woman. So you can fuck off, you self-satisfied little patriarch.

ARGH. It is now actually five am. I think to finish this in time, I should get up at eight. That brings me to a grand total of three hours of sleep! Awesome.

Comments

[pinkishmew.livejournal.com]

Really? One in twelve?

And I was going to ask about things like identity and why you feel Indian and not English but you're busy and I shall ask at some later time. [nods] Possibly you have covered this topic somewhere; I'll go and look.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Really. *nodnod* Well, probably, because there are six billion people in the world, a billion Indian people, and half of them must be women... etc.

I am awake now! Ask away - I'd love to hear your questions.

[pinkishmew.livejournal.com]

Well, it occured to me that (hmm, assuming I know your life correctly) twenty years ago, the two of us were born in England. And I identify as English, but you - in the 1/12 example - identify as Indian.

Obviously it's more complicated than that due to family and so on, but I just thought it was something to ponder on.

Do you feel 'English'? I don't feel that English is a personality or a type, but for me it's just a sign of which country I was brought up in. I am aware that it's easy for me to simplify because I'm white in a white-dominated culture, which could be another factor. I don't know; I've always been white. I can't think any other way. Erm, if that makes sense.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You know my life right, I think. I was born in Liverpool, and until I went to Oxford, have spent all my life living close by. And it's all kind of complicated. Because, well, yes, I grew up in a British city, went to a British school, and had British friends. But that's not all it is. My parents came to this country three years before I was born - they're Indian in every sense, they grew up in India, both got their medical degrees from Indian universities, and came to this country expecting to stay only a couple of years.

And even apart from my family, I'm Indian because I have brown skin, I'm a Hindu, and I'm always a tiny bit different. I know it sounds trivial, but things like washing your dishes differently pile up as a huge stack of difference, and when you're in school, all you want to do is conform and this sort of thing rankles. Then comes Christmas - and my first Christmas, the year I started school, was a real, bizarre culture shock. So you can't think of yourself as British, because you're not. You're not-white in a white-dominated culture, and you can't feel quite safe.

I didn't start thinking of myself as British until I was an adult. I mean, I struggled at school but I'm a fairly-well assimilated adult, and perhaps washing my dishes differently doesn't matter so much now. I was a lot more angsty about it until just recently, when I got my dual citizenship papers. Which also sound like they shouldn't matter as much as all that, but they really did, because it dawned on me that there was now no sense in which I was not British and Indian - mentally, religiously, linguistically, by birth and now, legally. So that's the answer. I exist as part and both and in between both cultures.

"English", though, is not something I endorse - it's contingent. (If I'd been born three weeks earlier, I'd have been born in Scotland.) And besides, my name (which is actually a use-name) is Scottish, too. I used to live on the Welsh border. Besides, I've always thought that to assert such provincial identity, people generally refer to their parents being Scottish/Welsh/Irish, etc., and I certainly don't fit in with that definition.

In sum, I think this has to be experienced to be really understood. It's a peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance that I suppose I wouldn't wish on anyone, but still, I occasionally kind of like being a hyphenated person. Does that answer what you wanted to know?

[pinkishmew.livejournal.com]

Yes. That was really interesting. Thank you! :)

I'm glad you do feel connected to England, though, because I have this unquestioned link to England, and it's good feeling like you belong somewhere. I suppose it's like the difference between being gay and having a gay friend. You never quite live as they do or understand their life. (Um. Not you 'you'. Or me, actually. But straight people.)

You seem like the most English person I know. Working in a bookshop, going to Oxford, etc. (I think my idea of an English person is firmly rooted in 19th Century literature. *g*) Oh, I don't know. I'm not sure where this is coming from. I think I have Oxford-longing. I'd hate to think you weren't appreciating the bizarre Englishness of it all. ;)

Then again, I remember going to Holland, and feeling thrilled when I was back in England again. They spoke English, they were kind of similar, but ugh - oh so different. Very strange. Hmm.

Hell, I know from being atheist, bisexual, sci-fi geek, non-drinker, vegetarian, home-educated, non-feminine, engaged-at-18 how pushed to the outside I could feel. Adding something so obvious as a different skin colour - I can't imagine how that would feel, especially while trying to overcome all the other differences and trying to feel assimilated.

Yeah, I really don't know where I'm going with this. It's just interesting to think about. Identity and so forth - especially while rebuilding my concept of myself, and what I want for my life.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You're welcome, and I meant to reply to this before, I am sorry. The gay analogy is a good one - you don't know what it's like unless it happens to you, and it's not even what you would feel like travelling to Holland, or indeed, India, because it's never a feeling of being wholly alien, because you do fit - just not quite exactly.

You seem like the most English person I know. Working in a bookshop, going to Oxford, etc.

*laughs* Funny you should say that. I was having one of my periodic culture moans a couple of years ago, talking about my first couple of years in school - which were a horrible shock; I didn't have friends, I didn't know how to make friends, I was so lost in the language and so painfully shy that I came across as mute and stupid - and someone said to me, but, you still got through it all, you still won. And that's it, I guess. I had a bad start, but that's all it was.

Identity is very interesting indeed, I concur! Mine is a work in progress. I think everyone's is.