11 Imagining Power and Liberation Studies with My Mother ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE, BK ’21, YH STAFF
M
y own mother is an anomaly, by most accounts. She is eccentric, highly unstable, her moods mercury. I try not to blame her when I call her and she ends the phone call midway through my regular invocation of I love yous. She is spiteful, sometimes, and it hurts. She is smart.
My mother is an artist. Growing up, the bookshelves in our houses—first in Pennsylvania, and then in New York City, where we still live today—were cluttered with multisyllabic words. At seven, I was deeply confused by the thicket of anthropological texts stacked high in her studio and commensurate Nina Simone and Norah Jones songs playing on the radio. Her work focuses on themes like tourism and femininity, and is based heavily on postcolonial theory. It often draws from her experience as someone who traces her lineage from what is now the border between Bangladesh and India, whose mother experienced the trauma of war. She has spent her life trying to piece together what it means for her to have moved from Calcutta, to Manchester, to Queens. At the time, I didn’t understand her, didn’t know who Claude Levi-Strauss was—and why I should care? Everything she said seemed out of reach, and so too, was it out of reach for my father, a professor in the sciences. We made fun of her, I am ashamed to say. I think my father did it because her knowledge of theory tapped into his own insecurities about his ignorance. As for myself, I was a child, happy to accept the ordering of my household in this way. After all, my father was the one who gave me hugs before bed, my mother the one who never made it to recitals and concerts. She was strange, speaking with long words and heavy metaphors, when she did come. I didn’t understand her. So I sided with my father. As a high schooler, I did not have the tools to understand my placement in the world. I could not have told you my lineage’s relationship with colonialism. I didn’t know that my mother’s history was a history stretched across a new border. Perhaps part of it was that I was callous. But a miseducation which foregrounded Whiteness and White history in the United States contributed to my disregard and ignorance. Mine was a most traditional of educations: a background in “Atlantic History,” a study of conquistadors, a few years of Latin, and a narrative arch that ended with the neoliberal “beauty” of the 21st century.
realize the political power of writing, the way it can disrupt these words in communicating what it is that we students existing narratives of the “truth.” I saw writing as a site of and professors study. Perhaps, we came to conclude, it confronting power, but had not yet envisioned liberation. might be more apt to say that ours was the study of Power and Liberation. These words helped me understand what As I got older and began to fall in love with the potency my mother ultimately seeks with her art: to understand of writing, I struggled with a binaristic vision of the world, power, and to liberate herself and her people. replete with racial lines and exclusivity. My understanding of what a future could hold for me was modeled after Professor Okihiro also helped me refine my understanding what I saw as the primary tension of the world, the tension of language. Justice, he explained, was perhaps not the word between White people and Black people. Anti-Blackness I meant. Justice implies the presence of authority, that there weighed heavily on my mind growing up alongside Black are small acts that can be done to create equity. Perhaps, he artists and Black communities. And so I swore off my right seemed to say, what I had meant all along was liberation, a to write, because I didn’t believe that I deserved to take up freedom from all oppression, the defanging of power into space. Justice too, was a binary for me, and justice meant something more beautiful and more tender: love. silencing myself to make way for Black writers and Black art. I was part of the problem, I knew. I had listened to my I have come back to writing these days, having learned to mother enough, read enough, to know this was the case. I extricate myself from the binaristic language that my classes spoke to my English professor many times about this con- in high school gave me. Studying power has taught me how cern, and though he tried to convince me that things were it has shaped my body and my life. more complicated than I realized, I didn’t believe him. You want to know why Ethnic Studies is important to me. I couldn’t write in the name of justice, so I convinced myself The truth is here before you. Ethnic Studies at Yale has to fall in love with law. I watched Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal made me feel whole again. It has made me understand the religiously, wanting to be just like Olivia Pope. This state of struggles my mother went through, it has dignified my peraffairs continued until last semester. I was insecure about son with the right to speak, and perhaps most importantly, my writing, because no one told me it could be useful in it has taught me that justice, and perhaps more importantly, advancing justice. As I waded further into Yale, I became liberation, is not something that is singularly promulgated more cognizant of how my socioeconomic privilege figured by the law. Liberation can be inched towards with writing, further into the reasoning for silence, this intention to void art-making, seeing the future. The path to liberation lies in my person in language. loving yourself and in dignifying yourself with the time to learn to grow. Liberation is something my mother and I talk I fought with my mother almost weekly first year. I did ri- about making together. diculous things in the name of pain. I went on a keto diet. I overcommitted. I didn’t sleep some nights. I cried in my The path to liberation is littered with actions: calling my top-bunk. I forgot what home meant. I imagined justice as mom on Sunday afternoons, talking to her about Dr. Kelan unpliable, sticky liquid. I became friends with a Black lie Jones’s piece, and did she have any recommendations? writer and felt further implicated in every corner of injus- It is the understanding between us that the institutions of this world have tried to figure our people, the people of the tice with no tools to fight back. Third World, out of existence and into silence. It is owning And then I took Intro to Third World Studies with Profes- up to anti-Blackness in the Asian American community sor Gary Okihiro, a well-known and well-loved Ethnicity, but realizing that it is a part of deeper and more insidious Race & Migration course. Professor Okihiro lended me the mechanisms at work. It is understanding every way power language I needed to understand and dignify my mother’s inches into our lives. Recalling those different communiwork, and to understand my own social formation. I began ties we drifted to, I think I was in the fight all along: the to call my mother weekly to chat about the readings. She coalition of artists in Brooklyn that showered me with love had read everything I had read when she was in graduate and tried to pass the torch of passion and resilience down school. For the first time in my life, I started to see myself to the next generation. I thought my hand was burning this in the mirror in the morning. I started to realize that my whole time. But Ethnic Studies has finally taught me how mother and I are part of a community that has always strug- to grasp the handle, and with this light, to glimpse our fugled to be understood and to understand the world in turn. ture: liberation.
One of my few respites was English class, where Black professors taught us Black literature. The summer after my sophomore year, I received a first edition of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin as a prize for an English award. I was talking to Professor Okihiro the other day, about the The book sits on my bookshelf at home now, alongside all naming of the program as “Ethnicity, Race & Migration.” my mother’s volumes. After I read that book, I began to Our conversation eventually touched on the inefficacy of