Not Quite Not White

by Sharmila Sen

  Since their empire stretched from Guyana in South America to Hong Kong in Asia, the British had easy access to Indian sugarcane farmers. They were subjects who could be moved around the globe according to the needs of the rulers. These Indians were brought to the New World as indentured laborers to work in the same cane fields where black slaves had toiled for centuries. The indentured laborers lived in the slave barracks. They traveled on board the same ships that had been used in the slave trade. Indentured laborers—derisively called “coolies”—were not slaves before the eyes of the law. But can we call them immigrants? These men and women did sign an agreement—indentureship papers—and were looking for higher wages and better employment opportunities. Can we call them Homo economicus? Did they make a rational choice to journey perilously on board old slave ships—a journey that often proved fatal? Did they know what conditions awaited them in the New World? Did they know most of them would never return after their period of indentureship concluded?

  What we do know is that these Indians called themselves girmityas. It is a beautiful instance of an English word that has been appropriated and indigenized by Indians to great aesthetic and political ends. The English word “agreement”—referring to the indentureship contract—is the foundation of girmit. Girmityas is the plural form of the noun. Girmityas make up most of the global labor diaspora of South Asians. From Fiji to Uganda to Trinidad, girmityas built infrastructure, grew cash crops, and generated wealth for the British Empire. The men who are building the Louvre and the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi are the modern-day girmityas. The Indian men who bus tables in hole-in-the-wall curry joints in London, or the Indian women who work as domestic help in American suburbs, are following the footsteps of girmityas.

  White-collar, graduate-school-educated, Indian STEM professionals who have immigrated to the United States since the 1990s see themselves as unrelated to these contemporary coolies, or to girmityas of another era. What does an Ivy-educated Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has just raised millions of dollars for his start-up have in common with the illiterate sugarcane farmer who has just stepped off the ship in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1838? Perhaps not much, but our older diasporas in the southern Caribbean might have a few pertinent lessons to offer us. Lessons in living with people of other races, in politics, in Americanization, and in creolization.

  Americanization to me is a New World phenomenon—a phenomenon of the Americas. Americanization is something far more profound than simple assimilation into the dominant culture of the United States. It is a process of creolization. The English creole, the Spanish criollo, the French créole, the Portuguese crioulo—all these words have a common root in the Latin creare, to produce or create. The creole is born in the New World. Even more expansively, we can say that the creole is created in the New World. In this sense, all immigrants are creole. Indeed, all of the Americas is creole. The creole is the most valuable thing made in America.

  Some creoles celebrate arrival on American shores and others celebrate emancipation from slavery on American shores. My memory of August 11, 1982, is a precious relic. As each year takes me further away from the moment of arrival, I polish and preserve my relic with religious zeal. During the month of May each year—May 30 in the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, and May 5 in Guyana—Indian arrival is celebrated with great fanfare by the descendants of indentured laborers. The descendants of slaves, the Afro-Creole population of the Caribbean, do not celebrate their own Arrival Day. Can you imagine celebrating the arrival of your ancestors in shackles on board slave ships? What would that parade look like? On the first day of August each year, the black citizens of Trinidad and Guyana celebrate Emancipation Day.

  Those who celebrate arrival and those who celebrate emancipation—what is the distance between these two groups? For one the sense of belonging in the New World is rooted in the triumph of arrival. For another the sense of belonging in the New World is rooted in the tragedy of enslavement. These are two threads of world history, two threads of racial memory, two ways of looking at how we came to be here.

  When I was a young academic doing research in the Caribbean I began to see my memory of arrival—a memory that Ma, Baba, and I kept alive in our home through frequent retellings—as part of the story of large population movements. This story was far bigger in scope, involving millions of actors, thousands of species of flora and fauna, hundreds of years, and vast sums of money, and spanning the world from the Ganges River to the Caribbean Sea.

  * * *

  • • •

  I arrived in Boston during the Reagan years. The Cold War was on. The Berlin Wall stood tall. India was a nonaligned Third World nation of little consequence to the United States. It was long before the era of cell phones and social media. In the last century—the era of aerogrammes and trunk calls in India—for those in economically straitened circumstances the imagination was the best possible mobile device for conjuring up a home left behind. I missed our little one-bedroom home in Calcutta, my school, my neighborhood. I remembered Darwanji, who had taken me for walks since I was a toddler. I imagined the cows that slept on the sidewalk outside our main door, the feral dogs that barked all night, the harsh sound of the crows. The silence of the American streets made me homesick. At first, each season brought unfamiliar sensations. When I walked to the bus stop or to the laundromat with Ma, everyone seemed to be inside their house doing things I did not quite understand. And a little part of me felt humiliated—even though I did not know how to give a name and shape to that shame—that my parents had to leave the country of my birth for economic reasons. I cried into my pillow and in locked bathrooms. I craved the food we ate every day back in India, even though before we left I had not thought it was anything special. I yearned to speak in my mother tongue everywhere I went.

  The Architect gave me my first American book. It was called The Stranger and was written by a man whose name I read in my mind as Kamooose but was told by my benefactor—a childless man who mercifully did not give me reading-grade-appropriate books—that I was pronouncing the author’s name incorrectly. I did not like the book but read diligently because it made me sad to read about a man whose mother had died and who went to jail and there was no happy ending. It matched my own unnameable mood. The novel was in English—though upon later inspection I found it had not been written in English originally. I wanted to make sure my English was very good because I had overheard my parents worrying that my language skills may not be up to snuff for American schools. My shimmering linguistic world of Bengali now shrunk to the confines of our little attic apartment furnished largely with things others had discarded.

  When people move they inevitably bring certain things with them, leave a few things behind, and acquire new possessions. My parents had asked me to choose what I wanted to take with me to Boston. I was allotted a single suitcase. Everything else was to be sold, given to relatives, or thrown away. This is what I chose to bring in my suitcase:

  Red plastic View-Master with four reels (Disney World, Japan, Baby Animals, and Mecca)

  Four Bengali books—Raj Kahini (Royal Tales) by Abanindranath Tagore; Aam Antir Bhepu (The Song of the Road) by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay; Shishu (Child), a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore; and Gopal Bhand (Stories of Gopal the Royal Fool)

  My report cards from my old school, attesting to my grades from 1974 to 1982

  My beloved collection of miniature plastic animals that came free with the purchase of Binaca brand toothpaste in India during the 1970s

  A Misha commemorative pin from the 1980 Moscow Olympics

  A couple of dresses made of printed cotton

  A pair of gray denim pants, the closest thing I owned to the coveted American blue jeans

  A pair of blue canvas shoes from Bata, the most popular shoe company in India

  None of these items were going to be of much practical use, as I soon found out. The tools and weapons I need
ed to survive and flourish in the New World were waiting for me elsewhere. I would find them in the hallways of my new school. And on the small screen of our black-and-white TV.

  At my new school on Linnaean Street, I soon found out, we had no uniforms and all classes were coeducational. I learned that when the teacher calls on you in an American class, you do not stand up to answer. My American teachers always asked for our opinions about everything we were studying—history, literature, science, mathematics, programming in BASIC. I was accustomed to memorizing everything and regurgitating it during tests. That was the Indian way of succeeding in school. I had done well in my Calcutta school precisely because I had a good memory and could learn everything by heart. What use was by-heart learning when a teacher asked for my opinion? Much like answering questions about my feelings, I was baffled by having to offer my opinion on the subjects we studied in class. In those early days, I marveled at the confidence with which some of my American classmates—many of whom were far behind me in subjects such as math, science, and history—expressed their opinions on everything with great clarity, and even challenged the teacher on occasion.

  At my old school, each class (what Americans called “grade”) had sections (what Americans called “homerooms”). At my old school, no teacher attempted to entertain the students. School was serious business. In order to make school more joyful, everything at the Peabody School was given a funny name. My school bus was called the Red Lobster and bore a small image of the crustacean on its windshield. Homerooms had names inspired by classic 1980s arcade games—Asteroids, Defenders, Omega Race. I was a member of Omega Race—absolutely clueless about arcades or the game itself.

  In Indian schools there were no cafeterias, so everyone brought their own lunch in tiffin boxes. We ate our tiffin at our desk or while wandering about the school corridors or out in the playground during tiffin time. Americans have recess and school lunches are served in cafeterias. Sloppy joes, Salisbury steaks, chicken nuggets, square pizzas, Jell-O, endless small cartons of milk. My classmates zipped through the cafeteria line, long familiar with the menu and confident in their own preferences. I had a lot of catching up to do.

  The Peabody School was located in a white, upper-middle-class neighborhood. Most of the black and Hispanic students traveled by school buses from other neighborhoods. During class, we had assigned seating. During recess, however, most students self-segregated according to race. It did not take a long time for a young immigrant girl to notice this. I had to learn where I should sit at lunch and who I should expect to hang out with at recess. Our apartment was not close to the school. After school it was not possible for me to walk over to the beautiful homes of those classmates who lived a block or two away. None of them asked me over anyway. Other kids—mostly black, Hispanic, and a few Asian ones—climbed into school buses and disappeared to different parts of town. At the time, I did not know that the entire city of Boston had been embroiled in a school desegregation battle that had pitted white families against black families since the controversial 1965 Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act. In the early 1980s, the dust had not quite settled yet. The headline-grabbing riots of the 1970s were over—the wars in which white families from South Boston and Charlestown refused federally mandated desegregation of schools through busing; the wars in which white and black students were beaten up by those who opposed their political views. The word “desegregation” was never spoken out loud by anyone inside my school. Occasionally, I heard the mysterious word “busing” mentioned by the teachers but had no idea what they meant by it.

  Except for our black gym teacher, all my teachers at the Peabody School were white. The principal was white. Everyone who worked in the principal’s office was white. I was not adept enough at parsing American surnames. Unless a teacher spoke at length about his family, I could not yet tell the difference between an Irish American and an Armenian American, between a Jew and a WASP. I did not understand that all Christians were not on equal footing. As a Hindu girl who was educated by nuns for most of her life up to that point, Catholicism and Christianity were inseparable for me. I had attended a Christian school in Calcutta. Naming it as “Catholic” would be as strange to me as labeling the followers of Jesus in the tenth century as “Catholics.” Weren’t all Christians Catholics? The first Protestants I encountered at close quarters lived in Cambridge. They belonged to a dizzying variety of denominations and churches. While being wholly ignorant of the religious history of America, I was beginning to sense that there were hierarchies among white Christians. It felt like sitting down at someone else’s family dinner table midway through a meal. Old quarrels echoed in the polite tinkling of silverware as everyone ate in silence.

  I would have to wait two more years, until I started high school, when blacks and Asians would be my teachers. Yet, already I sensed there were fault lines within our Omega Race. My black classmates sat in their own groups in the cafeteria, huddled together between classes, wore their clothes in slightly different styles. In Calcutta, I knew that I must not speak with Prakash when he walked into a room. In Cambridge, I did not yet know the rules of silence among children. A hurricane had blown through Boston and its surrounds in the decade preceding my arrival. I found the detritus all around me but had no idea how to decode it.

  In the early 1980s, Asians and Latinos were caught between Boston’s black and white polarized politics. Many Asians and Latinos opposed desegregation of the schools for their own reasons. The Chinese and Latino communities, for instance, had worked hard to form public bilingual schools in the city during the 1970s and desegregation would jeopardize the existence of such schools. Meanwhile, the arrival of new immigrants from Southeast Asia, following America’s disastrous war in the region, was fanning the flames of anti-Asian sentiments in working-class white neighborhoods. Indian immigrants like me were still relatively rare in Boston. The real wave of arrivals would start almost a decade later, during the 1990s, as H-1B visas would be used by companies to bring temporary Indian workers who could be paid much less than native-born American IT professionals.

  Aged twelve, I knew very little about the desegregation wars being fought in city halls and in public schools. I knew very little about the changing demographics of Boston as new kinds of immigrants were beginning to change the face and the politics of the city. What I did know was that I had to devise a plan for Total Americanization before the end of the year.

  * * *

  • • •

  Between Labor Day 1982 and Christmas 1982, I was determined to acquire a new American accent. I did this by watching a lot of shows after school on a nine-inch black-and-white Sony TV, handed down to us by the Architect. General Hospital, Hawaii Five-O, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Three’s Company, The Jeffersons, Good Times—I watched it all after school when I was alone at home. There was no one to guide me through the maze of different eras of American culture, different regions, classes, or even races being depicted in these shows. I swallowed the whole lot in one voracious bite.

  Playing with the channel knob of that old television, I had chanced upon the ABC soap General Hospital early in the autumn of 1982. General Hospital aired at three p.m. EST, which worked perfectly with my schedule. I would quickly walk home from the school bus stop, let myself into our attic apartment, grab an Entenmann’s frosted chocolate doughnut, and sit on the floor in front of the TV screen. Since we’d never had a TV before, I did not mind that I could not see all of Port Charles, the fictional setting of GH, in full color. In black and white, Edward and Lila Quartermaine quarreled in their mansion. Nurses gossiped in their station. Robert Scorpio chased criminals on behalf of the WSB, an international spy agency. Frisco romanced Felicia. The young Demi Moore, John Stamos, Ricky Martin, and Rick Springfield all entered my life in black and white. I was addicted.

  The British actress Emma Samms played the role of Holly, the love interest of Robert Scorpio played by the Australian actor Tristan Rogers. H
olly fascinated me. I wanted her perm, her clothes, her life. Later, when Holly left the show, Anna Devane—played by another British actress, Finola Hughes—became my new ideal. What attracted me to these characters—Robert, Anna, and Holly, and later, the character of Jax played by Ingo Rademacher—was their desirable foreignness. They lived in the all-American Port Charles but carried marks of their outsider status as Brits or Aussies. They spoke English with a different accent. If only I could be different like them. The sort of foreigner with an accent that Americans love, not the sort of foreigner who is teased for sounding funny.

  Even the villainous Cassadines possessed a type of foreignness that I lacked. They were Russian aristocrats with their own Greek island. They had cool names such as Helena, Stavros, and Nikolas. Sharmila never sounded like the name of a person who might own a Greek island. Port Charles, as I knew it back then, was largely white. Occasionally a mobster like Sonny Corinthos showed up with hints of vague brownness. But Sonny’s Cuban, Greek, and Italian background really did not make much sense to me.

  On early-release days, I watched all the other ABC soaps on Channel 5. This became familiar American geography to me—Pine Valley, PA. Llanview, PA. Corinth, PA. Port Charles, NY. If I did not understand all the cultural references or the colloquialisms at first, by the end of my first twelve months in the United States, I was fluent in the language of American soaps.

  Before my parents came home from work, I had two to three hours of viewing freedom. From Port Charles, New York, I wandered to other places. I peeked into different American homes, trying to break the code and learn the rules of engagement. The rural Virginia home on Walton’s Mountain was nothing like the Chicago apartment of Good Times. Florida and James’s financial struggles looked different from those of John and Olivia. With little knowledge about the Great Depression of the 1930s or the Cabrini-Green projects of inner-city Chicago during the 1970s, watching these slices of American life was like playing with a heap of jigsaw puzzle pieces without the complete image on the box to guide me. It takes a lot longer to put the pieces together this way. Sometimes a small fragment of the puzzle comes together, while the larger picture continues to be elusive.