On Skin Lighteners

Some say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,


I say the darker the flesh then the deeper the roots

 – Tupac Shakur


Thanks to a fellow Indicorps 'fella' who put this in her report.

Dear India,

How do you manage to cram so many people in one country; so many people that there is no concept of private space, that I can’t help but offer my lap to the old grandma determined to fit into an overfilled auto, that even going to take a shit is a social event?How is it that when I’m walking through a sea of peopleI feel so alone? 

Your multiplicities bewilder, amuse, inspire, stimulate, and frustrate me. I am humbled by the resourcefulness and determination of your citizens and feel helpless by the normalization of society’s greatest tragedies: hunger, violence, servitude, the list goes on. How does one robbed of dignity recover it in your arms?

How come I don’t see very much of you in me? When I refer to you in Ukkali, I say “our India”, then correct myself and say “your India”, because I’m not sure I know what ‘my’ India looks like and if it is anything like their India.

When will I stop referring to your people as ‘them’? Can it ever transform to ‘us’?  I’m waiting for the day when I truly internalize the reality that my well-being is tied up in your people’s well-being. My secure safety net prevents me from recognizing the joint struggle. It’s difficult for me to relate because when most of your people slip, there is nothing below to catch them. 

India, in you I hoped to find a part of myself. I don’t think I will find that lost piece of my identity that I so long for, but instead, I am creating pieces to fit into a new puzzle. Why did I think living within your boundaries would hand me all the answers? It seems like I’m asking more questions than ever before.   

“True generosity lies in striving so that these hands – whether of individuals or entire peoples – need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work, and working, transform the world. This lesson and this apprenticeship, however, must come from the oppressed themselves and from those who are truly solidary with them.”

 – Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Am I solidary with your people, the unjustly oppressed that survive within you? I want to be. I will be. It’s harder than I thought.