Every few months, when one of my favorite TV shows finishes, I go looking for a replacement. The decision to commit to a new show relies on an undefinable chemistry between me and the show. And once the commitment is made, it's irrevocable, barring really egregious decisions by the writers (for example, Downton Abbey - it's gone so steadily downhill, and yet I refuse to stop watching.)
I recently found The Mindy Project, although I didn't expect to. I followed Mindy Kaling on Twitter a few months ago because I expected her Twitter feed to be a barrel of laughs. It was more a barrel of convoluted inside jokes between her and a lot of people who weren't me. She's clearly intelligent, capable, and driven, but there's something about her general demeanor that suggested the sorority sister whom I avoided in college because she was constantly getting obsessed with things I didn't relate to: china patterns, frilled clothing, Kardashian love lives.
But I enjoyed The Mindy Project. And then I went and read a review of it on Vulture. And the critic said this:
"There’s something quietly revolutionary about those images of a young brown-skinned Indian girl re-watching Hollywood rom-coms and memorizing the dialogue. We’re not just seeing pop culture cannibalize itself in these scenes. They’re also a statement on the messy emotional realities of assimilation — on how men and women who, for whatever reason, should naturally identify as outsiders in the American mainstream want to be in the middle of it."
This paragraph stuck in my craw. It just...bothered me, like when a fly gets stuck in a room and won't stop buzzing. But I couldn't figure out why I was annoyed. And then I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story," and I figured it out.
Adichie is one of my favorite authors. Several years ago, the New Yorker ran her short story "Birdsong" (paywall), the story of a young Nigerian woman who has an affair with an older, married, man. It's a beautiful story. But in her TED talk, Adichie talks about how she was once told that her stories weren't "authentically African," because she focused on educated, middle-class people. These critics - none of them Africans - urged Adichie to write stories that conformed to the African narrative they found familiar.
"The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete," she says in her talk.
And that's what bothers me about the critic's comment. Because there is nothing revolutionary about The Mindy Project. Of course Indian-American girls watch Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry met Sally, just like white and black girls do. Why wouldn't they? How could they not? Does Matt Seitz believe that TV waves discriminate based upon skin color? That they sense the presence of a non-white face, and go scurrying back into the TV set?
There is another moment that Adichie talks about, and that is the moment when she first realized that the British stories she read growing up (about blue-eyed children frolicking in the snow) were all about white people from the UK. And that she was not a white person from the UK. In a strange demographic twist, most of us are minorities in some way. And many have this moment of realization at some point. We look at the heroes of sitcoms, the heroes of history, and we realize, "wait a minute - these people are all white." Or "Hey, they're all men!" No matter how much you love the stories you grew up with, you can't go back from this realization. Because you also realize that although you have spent years seeing yourself as part of a community, that community sees you as an outsider.
We, the brown girls of the world (and by extension, the curly-haired girls, the Arab girls, the girls with big noses and unfashionable teeth, the brown boys, etc), have no trouble seeing ourselves in all the stories and culture we grew up with. It's people like Seitz - an adult man, who really has no excuse - who cannot see us there, because we are "brown-skinned." Just because something is revolutionary for him doesn't mean it is a revolution in any actual sense. (And that leaves aside the troubling phrase "should naturally identify as outsiders" - what does that mean? That there is some separate but equal cultural sidestream for non-white people, where they belong? That Indian-Americans should watch Bollywood, and Hispanic-Americans should watch Telemundo?)
Single narratives, Adichie says, are the result of power. Those in power have the luxury of choosing their narrative, or creating alternatives. Until recently, there was a single Indian-American narrative. It prompted much of Jhumpa Lahiri's success - her stories rely on a vision of assimilation that conforms to what people expect (that doesn't make them bad). If we have more Indian-American narratives today, it's because we have people like Mindy Kaling, whose show (whatever its other weaknesses) conforms to none of these types. But again - just because a show challenges one man's race-based perceptions, doesn't mean it is actually breaking ground. That is his narrative: a man who one day woke up and realized minority girls watch the same movies as everyone else. But it certainly isn't mine. I hope it isn't most people's.
As I prepare to move back to the United States after 5.5 years in India, I'm acutely aware that in the eyes of many Americans, India is a single narrative. I realize this every time I'm in a conversation and someone asks, "Gosh, how do you live in Delhi as a woman?" I wonder what to say. "Just like everyone else?" Because this isn't just a narrative about Delhi. It's a narrative about Indian women, as well, a narrative that assumes all Indian women lead subpar and unequal lives. That we live under the constant looming threat of assault. Maybe this last bit is true. But so do women all over the world.
I don't know how to reconcile the hard and global truths about "being a woman in India" with the lived reality of my past 5.5 years, which has intersected with those truths but also superseded them. I wonder what stereotypes I will encounter about India in the US - I'm sure there will be many - and whether I'll explain their incompleteness, or just give up, and stop trying to explain it at all. In some ways, I have new respect for my parents, who have navigated this journey every day of their lives. (The US, because of its cultural power, is not a single narrative country in this way, or at least, not to the same extent.)
I recently found The Mindy Project, although I didn't expect to. I followed Mindy Kaling on Twitter a few months ago because I expected her Twitter feed to be a barrel of laughs. It was more a barrel of convoluted inside jokes between her and a lot of people who weren't me. She's clearly intelligent, capable, and driven, but there's something about her general demeanor that suggested the sorority sister whom I avoided in college because she was constantly getting obsessed with things I didn't relate to: china patterns, frilled clothing, Kardashian love lives.
But I enjoyed The Mindy Project. And then I went and read a review of it on Vulture. And the critic said this:
"There’s something quietly revolutionary about those images of a young brown-skinned Indian girl re-watching Hollywood rom-coms and memorizing the dialogue. We’re not just seeing pop culture cannibalize itself in these scenes. They’re also a statement on the messy emotional realities of assimilation — on how men and women who, for whatever reason, should naturally identify as outsiders in the American mainstream want to be in the middle of it."
This paragraph stuck in my craw. It just...bothered me, like when a fly gets stuck in a room and won't stop buzzing. But I couldn't figure out why I was annoyed. And then I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story," and I figured it out.
Adichie is one of my favorite authors. Several years ago, the New Yorker ran her short story "Birdsong" (paywall), the story of a young Nigerian woman who has an affair with an older, married, man. It's a beautiful story. But in her TED talk, Adichie talks about how she was once told that her stories weren't "authentically African," because she focused on educated, middle-class people. These critics - none of them Africans - urged Adichie to write stories that conformed to the African narrative they found familiar.
"The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete," she says in her talk.
And that's what bothers me about the critic's comment. Because there is nothing revolutionary about The Mindy Project. Of course Indian-American girls watch Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry met Sally, just like white and black girls do. Why wouldn't they? How could they not? Does Matt Seitz believe that TV waves discriminate based upon skin color? That they sense the presence of a non-white face, and go scurrying back into the TV set?
There is another moment that Adichie talks about, and that is the moment when she first realized that the British stories she read growing up (about blue-eyed children frolicking in the snow) were all about white people from the UK. And that she was not a white person from the UK. In a strange demographic twist, most of us are minorities in some way. And many have this moment of realization at some point. We look at the heroes of sitcoms, the heroes of history, and we realize, "wait a minute - these people are all white." Or "Hey, they're all men!" No matter how much you love the stories you grew up with, you can't go back from this realization. Because you also realize that although you have spent years seeing yourself as part of a community, that community sees you as an outsider.
We, the brown girls of the world (and by extension, the curly-haired girls, the Arab girls, the girls with big noses and unfashionable teeth, the brown boys, etc), have no trouble seeing ourselves in all the stories and culture we grew up with. It's people like Seitz - an adult man, who really has no excuse - who cannot see us there, because we are "brown-skinned." Just because something is revolutionary for him doesn't mean it is a revolution in any actual sense. (And that leaves aside the troubling phrase "should naturally identify as outsiders" - what does that mean? That there is some separate but equal cultural sidestream for non-white people, where they belong? That Indian-Americans should watch Bollywood, and Hispanic-Americans should watch Telemundo?)
Single narratives, Adichie says, are the result of power. Those in power have the luxury of choosing their narrative, or creating alternatives. Until recently, there was a single Indian-American narrative. It prompted much of Jhumpa Lahiri's success - her stories rely on a vision of assimilation that conforms to what people expect (that doesn't make them bad). If we have more Indian-American narratives today, it's because we have people like Mindy Kaling, whose show (whatever its other weaknesses) conforms to none of these types. But again - just because a show challenges one man's race-based perceptions, doesn't mean it is actually breaking ground. That is his narrative: a man who one day woke up and realized minority girls watch the same movies as everyone else. But it certainly isn't mine. I hope it isn't most people's.
As I prepare to move back to the United States after 5.5 years in India, I'm acutely aware that in the eyes of many Americans, India is a single narrative. I realize this every time I'm in a conversation and someone asks, "Gosh, how do you live in Delhi as a woman?" I wonder what to say. "Just like everyone else?" Because this isn't just a narrative about Delhi. It's a narrative about Indian women, as well, a narrative that assumes all Indian women lead subpar and unequal lives. That we live under the constant looming threat of assault. Maybe this last bit is true. But so do women all over the world.
I don't know how to reconcile the hard and global truths about "being a woman in India" with the lived reality of my past 5.5 years, which has intersected with those truths but also superseded them. I wonder what stereotypes I will encounter about India in the US - I'm sure there will be many - and whether I'll explain their incompleteness, or just give up, and stop trying to explain it at all. In some ways, I have new respect for my parents, who have navigated this journey every day of their lives. (The US, because of its cultural power, is not a single narrative country in this way, or at least, not to the same extent.)
read your latest blog post and this one, liked what you write
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