by Mati’r Meye
Much discussion surrounds the male gaze, and the white gaze, but these days I am cognizant of a growing eastern gaze that has not entered traditional scholarship; rising alongside the archetype of ‘the pick-me girl’ subscribing to male standards, are student immigrants of the west upholding whiteness to obtain a taste of its privilege. I have long hesitated to confess my personal guilt in this systematic pandering, but I must take accountability so I can be change I want to see.
On the event of the 50th anniversary of Bangladeshi independence, I contributed to some poems in an anthology to celebrate its liberation that was published by University Press, the first publisher of Bangladesh.
During the book launch for the anthology ‘Golden: Bangladesh at 50’ in Edge Gallery at Dhaka, I was given a space to talk about the poetry I published, but before I got on the podium I was at a loss on what to say. An elderly writer and Sanskritist (also a dancer, choreographer and community organiser, I learned later) happened to be sitting next to me and I had no idea who she was, or how much respect society had for her; I only noticed the bejewelled necklace around her glasses which convinced me she enjoyed colour and I trust people who respect the small joys of inviting colour into their lives.
‘Premature Victory
Being as esteemed as she is in our community for protecting intangible cultural heritage (again, I later learned this from a search engine), I was taken aback in the best way possible when she asked for my autograph on her favourite poem penned by myself. This was the poem:
Heavy-shouldered with unbelongings,
He entered Toronto with a mouth already
Curled into an accent from an English medium education,
Ready to order a life his mother wouldn’t allow him.
His desk was the jungle of makeup brushes he always wanted,
With the space of a picture of a family photo he never looked at,
The bedroom, the kitchen glowing with a sense of welcome,
That the bathroom didn’t have because of that missing bidet faucet.
He still had his dinner with rice and extra chillies but
The spice jars emptied rather quickly to make room
For a milder tongue that could satisfy men
Who would never know how to love him.
When the day arrived, he walked with the friends who adopted him,
His eyes glowing the colour of a prism under the sun,
To the walk of second hand pride we’d only dreamed of.
He waved flags and kissed men he didn’t know, leaving early.
What was he celebrating when the boys at home were still in hiding?’
It was written about my best friend of 15 years, who was viciously bullied not only for his queer, effeminate nature, but also his morbid obesity. On the podium, I discussed that in the global south as well as the east, especially Bangladesh, the greatest badge of honour one can have is not to stay within the community but emigrate. This is our premature victory – the hope of someday becoming bideshi, with a respectable passport that protects you from racism, homophobia and transphobia that the bideshis brought on our turf when they grew tired of the blandness of their cuisine to steal our spices, our land, and our jewels.
In a classroom (and I will not specify which to avoid allegations of defamation) a queer individual was proudly displaying a presentation of their project on queer archetypes, limited to western queer archetypes.
I responded to their selective research and academic bias with some citations of evidence surrounding queerness in Hindu Mythology, long before the practice of pederasty, hebephilia, and paraphilia that is most present in the classics of Greece and Rome.
In this classroom I experienced something Medium.com academics will refer to as “whitesplaning”. Not only were my citations ignored, but I was not allowed the voice of educating them on the colonial persecution of the Hijra community, the intersex manifestations of Shiva and Parvati morphing to present both the divine feminine and masculine called Aranadhishvara, the story of King Ila who was “cursed” with gender fluidity to understand genders, the goddess Arani whose wisdom of lesbian eroticism was considered to spiritually invoke her powers, the androgynous singular union of Lakshmi and Vishnu as Lakshmi-Narayana, and the countless examples of same-sex interactions beyond Indian mythology and in human populations, before Abrahamic faiths stood to suppress and silence this ancient knowledge.
It was the same writer with the beautiful glasses, who encouraged me to look into these histories without any preaching or nudging. I was invited to read her story on another book event and after butchering the entire Sanskrit passages in public, I processed my humiliation into a resoluteness to rid my personal ignorance to the ancient origins of my culture and scratch at the surface of Hindu mythology.
This was around the time that articles surrounding Virginia Woolf’s Bengali origin became viral in Bangladeshi media. Virginia Woolf’s bisexual relationship with Vita Sackville-West, her book Orlando, and her general flamboyance for being the star of the Bloomsbury Group much overshadow her general classism, anti-semitism, her nationalist snubbing of the Irishman James Joyce, and her white feminism of benefitting from the class system and construct of British Empire and colonisation.
When her progeny William Dalrymple identified her as his ancestor in popular article he suggested to “look at her face; it’s a Bengali face.” This made me lose a lot of respect for an otherwise brilliant travel writer as he not only brought along his white gaze of deciding what a Bengali person is, but his male gaze of judging by appearance and decided what a Bengali should look like.
Virginia Woolf deserves no merit in being celebrated as “a girl of the soil” when she herself had not set foot on my soil, but journalists suffering from the eastern gaze had no problem bowing to the internalized practices of white worship when this was revealed, because of how desperately we desire to be as important as white people. Orlando might be a revolutionary text in the west, but it pales in comparison to the complexity of the Puranas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata. That is not to say she does not hold any merit: she was a vibrant, vocal feminist caught in her complex nexus of white, colonial and economic privilege.
My eastern gaze is my personal and communal bias of using white standards to measure my success in the world. My eastern gaze is to groan in my feminine rage and vilify the white race for their mistakes, their persecution, their divisive tactics to tear apart my community by their respective faiths and belief systems, that hurt the Hindus of Bangladesh every day, and the Muslims of Modi’s nationalist governance – but revel in the delusional glory of being educated in universities either attended by royalty or upholding the concept of the royal. My eastern gaze is to take sides, and ignore the full picture, when the enemy is embodied in one singular entity: ignorance.
My eastern gaze is to identify as a Bangladeshi, when I am Bengali, an ethno-linguistic identity with no gendered pronouns, because my liberation from West Pakistan is purported to be more important to my identity politics than my true partitioned home: Bengal. My eastern gaze is to subscribe to nationalism and continue walking the path of my ancestral history of forced migration since the partition of British India in 1947, by being complicit in upholding the Greatness of Britain through the premature victory of emigrating the borders of a country they left to pieces. My eastern gaze is to pander to the power of white institutions for an education. My eastern gaze is to don the rainbow colours of the pride flag appropriated from the colours of the Hindu chakra system, (just as the Swastika was appropriated by the Nazi Party) and march in pride and solidarity with the LGBT community that considers inclusivity in the institution of marriage as a marker of progress, when marriage is what lends the patriarchy control over the rights of women and pubescent girls. My eastern gaze is to internalize the colonial residue of colourism and disbelieve in my natural human ethnic beauty, or prostitute it when asking to exist in a space with other white people who decide what beauty is. My eastern gaze is to take white superiority as a given.
My eastern gaze is to obey the authority of big business, neo-colonialist capitalism, and money and not only toil under it, but uphold it. My eastern gaze is to accept this status quo and treat human beings as currency.
My eastern gaze is to hold onto the yin and forget the yang, to be a feminist and not a humanist, to be communist and not an individualist, to be lauded by acceptance but allow my tokenisation, to be a polymath and a master of none, to polarize the morals and ethics of humanity and deny the wisdom of the infinite story: the invitation to the paradox that we are all wrong, and we are all right –
And we don’t have to kill each other to recognise it.
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This piece is part of Political & Personal: An Anthology of Gender & Sexuality Issues in Bangladesh, a weekly series by the Bangladesh Feminist Archives. To read all contributions and view submission guidelines, click here.
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