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Magazine
Million mutinies
ANJALI KAMAT
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Fatal Love, the annual South Asian cultural event organised in New York, elegantly traversed the double worlds of ongoing struggles in the U.S. and South Asia.
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The event created a space for reflection and engagement at a deeper and more imaginative level than was possible by the annual protests against the hyper-nationalism of the India Day parade.
DIFFERENT ARTICULATIONS: The artists panel with Chanika Svetvilas, Sarah Husain, and Sham e Ali Al Jameel.
ALMOST every weekend, as if to remind itself that it was built by immigrants, New York city cordons off one of its streets for a noisy celebration of a different national or ethnic pride — replete with colourful floats, food stalls, corporate sponsors, celebrity performances, and speeches by at least one elected city official. Come August and it's the turn of New York's Indians and Pakistanis to organise their own spectacles of immigrant success in the land of opportunity. But, away from the flag-waving crowds of Madison Avenue, in a far corner of the city at the end of the No. Seven subway line, a dedicated and creative group of artists, writers, performers, and activists from South Asia and the diaspora have, since 2000, gathered at the Queens Museum of Arts to mark what Faiz called the "mottled dawn" of South Asian independence, Partition, and freedom.
Against jingoism
This time the annual gathering, with art, performances, readings, and film screenings, was dubbed "Fatal Love", after the title of an article Suketu Mehta read at the first such event organised in 2000 by the Queens Museum and artist Jaishri Abichandani in the nearby South Asian immigrant stronghold of Jackson Heights. Since 2002, Abichandani has curated this well-attended event to build and celebrate solidarity among the many peoples of South Asia. Born out of the protests by progressive desis in the mid-1990s against the narrowly jingoistic India Day parade — which refused to allow groups working on domestic violence or gay rights to march — the political inspiration behind Fatal Love came from critical voices organising for change within New York's desi community. It is hardly surprising then that following September 11, 2001 and the upsurge in the racial profiling and surveillance of South Asians, Muslims, and Arabs in the United States, Fatal Love should also increasingly focus on the struggles of these communities.
In 2006, the poetry, visuals, and performances at Fatal Love were no less dominated by global political events: the crackdown on immigrants, heightened security paranoia, the U.S.-led "wars on terror," growing Islamophobia, State terror and custody deaths in the U.S. and South Asia, and reflections on present and past insurgencies in the independent States of South Asia. "Usually we build in more entertainment into the programming, but given the seriousness of recent events, this year our line up is fairly serious and will hopefully pique the interest of people and give them an opportunity to reflect and talk about these issues," explained Abichandani.
History as a mirror
Naeem Mohaiemen, a writer and an artist who is part of a New York-based group, the Visible Collective, used a powerful combination of video and text to hold up a dark chapter in South Asian history — what he calls the "dirty wars" of the 1970s — as a mirror to the present. Weaving together fragments of propaganda tapes, diaries of intellectuals, archival footage, and interviews, Mohaiemen's "The Young Man Was No Longer" documents the rise and violent fall of an underground guerrilla movement following independence, when the rebels who had earlier fought alongside nationalists were crushed. A timely and chilling meditation on the dashed hopes of an independence movement, and the State's Orwellian lexicon whereby "freedom fighters" turn overnight into "evil doers", "terrorists," and "special interest prisoners", the piece also touches — sometimes with macabre humour — on the widespread security panics and terrorising of anyone suspected of links to the insurgents.
The other performances were much more rooted in the present and the two public art performances — "Suitcases on Tour" by independent artist Chanika Svetvilas and an agit-prop performance by the theatrical group Emergency Broadcast Artists — were largely focused on creating awareness about the sheer violence and absurdity of recent U.S. immigration and foreign policy decisions. The readings — from Kiran Desai's new novel The Inheritance of Loss and Sarah Husain's just-released anthology Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith, and Sexuality — engaged with similar issues and elegantly traversed the double worlds of ongoing struggles in the United States and South Asia.
SURVEILLANCE': By Farheen Haq, Printed in `Voices of Resistance' collection.
If one strand of Desai's much-touted novel traces the life of an undocumented Indian immigrant in the harsh streets of Harlem and his steady disillusionment with the American way of life in the post-September 11, 2001 climate of suspicion and intolerance ("In America, in America, were they really getting the best of what was on offer?"), then both the Emergency Broadcast Artists as well as Svetvilas and the Asian American Legal Defence and Education Fund (AALDEF) in "Suitcases on Tour" echo similar themes around immigration laws, the Special Registration of all Muslim immigrant men, and the 3,000 Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians detained without criminal charge. Svetvilas had young people from immigrant communities in Queens carry red, orange, and yellow suitcases — the colours mimicking the security alert levels in New York — around their neighbourhood, with AALDEF manning a mobile immigration booth to answer people's questions about immigration, Special Registration, detention, and deportation.
The shared theme of Islamophobia in the U.S. was given full voice in Husain's collection. Written in the tradition of Gloria Anzaldua and Cherie Moraga's This Bridge Called My Back (1984), an anthology of writing by "radical women of colour", the book challenges every prevailing stereotype about Muslim women — both in the U.S. and in India — as passive, oppressed, voiceless, suspect, alien, dangerous, terrorist, pious, conservative, or even particularly "Muslim". The contributors are, Husain said, "straight, bisexual, veiled, transgendered, married, kafirs, part Hindu, apart from being Muslims".
Remembering the wars
These primarily South Asian Muslim women from across the world live in the U.S. and many of them were victims of hate crimes after September 11, 2001. Through poetry, artwork, and prose, they insist on histories that predate 9/11 and remember the wars across the world that started before and have deteriorated since that date. A poem by Hyderabadi-born contributor Sham e Ali Al Jameel highlights the particular experience of being targeted as a South Asian Muslim in the U.S.: "Remember the night/ the police informed us/ someone in the neighbourhood did not want us here? Our mail box blown up for the third time/ ... the year 1979/ ... . Not post 2001/ 1979."
The day opened and closed with public art pieces originally intended to engage people on the streets and beyond the museum's walls. These pieces were re-staged for the event, alongside video recordings of the actual performances and discussions with street audiences. The emphasis on taking art to the people blurred the division between the traditionally elite space of the museum and the communal space of bustling city streets, which led one artist to call for a move "out of the museum and into the streets!" In the growing climate of fear and suspicion within the U.S., many of those present indicated that the act of reclaiming public space through artistic engagement takes on a new urgency. Yet, and without any contradiction, everyone present clearly valued the Queens Museum of Arts, which, unlike most other museums and galleries, maintains, in Abichandani's words, "an absolute focus on the surrounding communities and remains really responsive and engaged in nurturing and fostering them." This is borne out by the particular history of the Fatal Love event, which created a space for reflection and engagement at a deeper and more imaginative level than was possible, for example, by the annual protests against the hyper-nationalism of the India Day parade.
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