Holding Space as Resistance for American POC

By APASA Co-Advocacy Chair Anahita Anahita

For Monday, September 22nd’s Open General Meeting, I presented and led a conversation about what it means to hold space and community as a form of resistance for American people of color. We discussed the painful history of land/space and its relationship with people of color, from the genocidal colonization of Native Americans by white settlers in the late 15th century to the Tulsa and Chinese Race Massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We talked about how ethnic enclaves and racially homogenous communities are “made, not created.” We ended with this letter I wrote to the author of my favorite book, Interpreter of Maladies, and understood how community doesn't always have to be a room of people whose parents speak the same language as yours, it could just be a book you read on the way to school in the morning.

Shorba: A letter to Jhumpa LahiriI

once was served shorba at a family friend's home as an appetizer before the later, heavier dinner was to be served.  It was handed to me in a clay cup, a kulhad, a small, soft, orangish-brown that shatters when thrown against a brick wall, the way I had been shown to do at a chai stall on a trip to India at some time in the blur of my childhood. I lifted the kulhad to my mouth and sipped loudly, identically to my parents and their friends, whom I watched intently, steam fogging the purple-rimmed glasses I used to wear, doing my best to assure there was no difference in their familiarity with the soup and cup and mine. The soup coated my throat with its spices. Its heat burned my tongue, leaving it scratchy.. Soon after everyone had taken their first sip, they informed my aunty who had made the shorba that “their throats had opened.” They spoke of times they had shorba, at cold hill stations, on street corners, in their neighborhood markets in the winter, together at friends' homes. I visualized their stories, this India that I never truly knew. I fantasized that it was me, not my uncles and aunties, who would run from their train, rupees in hand, to get chai, shorba, maggi, and snacks for their families or friends who waited for them, as they rushed to bring everything back onboard before the train left the station. I wondered what might have been if instead of the unruly, unbrushed hair I sported despite my mother’s agonizing, I braided my hair into two tight braids every morning. If it were me who wore an indian school uniform as I walked on the side of the streets, I normally experienced from inside of a family member’s car as we went from city to city, not bothering to stop in villages. If I, like my cousins, could navigate my grandparents' neighborhood by memory because I used to play cricket in the park nearby.

I allowed their stories to interwine‚—the Bollywood movies I grew up on and all of the South Asian literature I could get my hands on—creating a life I longed for. The subway in the winters felt far from romantic in comparison to their memories. Hot chocolate in a paper cup felt fatiguingly dense, while steaming shorba in a kulhad, which fills you with a sanctuary of warmth, that burns your tongue, that clears your throat with its roasted spices, felt exactly right.

I was 15 when I first read Interpreter of Maladies. I remember sitting on the M12, on the way to school, peeling through the pages like a devotee on a pilgrimage. For the first time, a book made me cry. My once-beloved YA novels of a couple years prior felt void next to mourning couples, affairs riddled with complexity, a professor’s wife learning to drive, and a biting theme of longing. It was the first time I saw myself, longing and all, on the page.

In “A Temporary Matter,” the first story in Interpreter of Maladies, Shoba and Shukumar have fallen out of love. My 15-year-old self was long from experiencing love, forget falling out of it, and yet I mourned with them, “for the things they now knew.” But when I read the opening story for the first time, and every time since then, my brain misplaces an r, and shoba and shorba are confused in my brain. As I read the story, I also find myself once again in that moment, listening to the stories of others, wondering if I will ever know them as my own. I find the writing, and the shorba, deeply comforting yet biting, not horribly painful until the realizations sink in. The realization that I will never truly know that country, and the realization that Shoba and Shukumar will never truly love each other again. However, the pain of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies repaired the damage of the shorba. The book taught me that the romantic India I longed for lived within me. That I still knew the flavors of the rogan josh they ate together, or the thrill of power outages in India. It was in the book that I found my kind of Indianness familiar enough. And I cannot begin to thank you enough for it. You taught me that good literature is when the smallest, rawest moments of life are written with overwhelming care and focus. You taught me that my immigrant parents’ stories are also mine, and that my stories are also theirs. Thank you.

Anahita Saxena