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Title: Heart of Darkness Author: Maia Ramnath Date: March 2004 Language: en Topics: story, racism Source: Retrieved on 4th March 2021 from https://users.resist.ca/~maio/essays/heartofdarkness.html
“If you could just fill out this form, the doctor will call you when
she’s ready for you.”
“OK.”
It’s been years since she visited the gynecologist. She avoids medical
attention at all costs, in a reverse-hypochondriac denial of her right
to sickness. But she’s come now in honor of starting a new relationship,
out of respect for someone else’s body; in the interests of full
disclosure-- of the truth, about her body and her health.
The grad student insurance plan makes it cheap and easy to drop by the
student health center, gives her access to dentists and eyeglasses and
emergency treatment if she needs it. At the same time, it’s grad school
that’s tainted healthcare for her forever. After all, once you’ve read
Foucault, you can never go back to the doctor again. She feels the net
of surveillance; it grids her skin like a crossword puzzle, cinching
close, drawing and quartering. Metal probes winkle out secrets, decode
her heartbeat, peep through keyholes into her secret dark places. Then,
forming conclusions from this ransacked knowledge, they will pass
judgments and prescribe normalizing mechanisms for her own good.
Nor do they stop with the body. Her pen freezes over the column of blank
lines. Why should she tell them if she drinks, or smokes, or how many
times per week she has sex, whether she prefers to have it with boys or
girls, or whether she has ever in her life been diagnosed with
depression or bipolarity or an eating disorder? To what kind of further
scrutiny or intervention will her answers submit her? Maybe some day
they’ll have blood tests and brain-chemistry read-outs for all these
things, instant revelations of her personal history and phylogeny. For
now, she can keep safe her self-knowledge. She can lie.
Then comes the question that always stymies her most of all.
“Race/ethnicity: check all that apply.” They didn’t used to let you do
that. The boxes have changed over the years; you get far more detailed
options now. She usually just checks “Other.” It’s the easiest thing.
The good part about that is that from the time she filled out her first
form in pre-school, she’s had no choice but to think outside the box,
which can’t but be healthy, right? This time she checks “East Indian or
Pakistani” and “European(Anglo, Nordic)” and surrenders the clipboard to
wait until they call her name.
She imagines the British colonial administrators with their census books
and taxonomies, their cameras and calipers, fixing and filing the
natives of South Asia under infinitely differentiated race headings. The
martial, the effeminate, the subhuman. How would they have marked her?
Would they have been angry when they learned her secret? She might have
been allowed to be an ayah or a train conductor.
Her father once asked her if anyone had ever made her feel bad about
being “mixed”. She said no, she’d always felt special. So why does it
matter, the need for connection, belonging, for people “like me”? Why
does it ache? Especially since she doesn’t want in to either box. Her
externality gives her the perfect excuse to deviate from the strictures
of feminine behavior, class or caste expectations. Thus within both
sides of a proud and conservative extended family, she’s got an
open-ended license for eccentricity. She’s already disqualified to a
certain degree from standards of normalcy. She trusts the doctors will
agree.
“Ms. Raym... Ramm...Ramnath? You can come on in to room two.”
A friend of hers, a philosopher, has been doing work on identity and
identification, and the construction of race. The concept of phylogeny,
says the philosopher, as used within Freudian discourse, relates to the
necessity of fencing off permissible sexual behavior: too close and it’s
family, which is taboo. Too distant and it’s beyond the pale, outside of
us and into the realm of them, which is also taboo. Family lore has it
that her mother’s grandfather Obert Nordgaard, upon meeting her mother’s
fiancé Suresh, remarked with approval and wonder, “Well, that’s a Norse
of a different color. He’s all right.” The philosopher is also exploring
the implication that people’s perceptions determine what you are: that
is, that they assign you a category and treat you accordingly, which
inevitably shapes your self-concept, your experience, your way of being
in the world. So you come to be what you look like, or at least you’re
supposed to. It’s easy, so easy to acquiesce; to simply behave in the
way that corresponds to who or what people think you are. She passes.
People read her as white: does that make her white? After all, the
structural mechanisms of racial inequity in the United States do not
impact her negatively. She doesn’t need to worry about them. And yet to
take this access for granted, to blithely join the in-group because she
can, feels morally wrong.
“Could you roll up your sleeve a little more? That’s it. Just breathe
normally.”
Finally, the philosopher is elaborating the themes of guilt and shame in
relation to racial identity, and to dealing with racial oppression. I
don’t have white guilt, she thinks. I have survivor’s guilt. She passes.
She’s healthy and well-educated, telltale signs of a middle-class
upbringing. So if she checks this box, no one will ask her any
questions: not law enforcement, not bigots, not office staff. Her secret
is safe; the deception holds. But in keeping it, does she betray her
conscience? And in accordance with conscience, where must her political
solidarity go? It’s in the search for political community that the
cognitive dissonance of her race affiliation most becomes an issue.
In general she’s tended to pursue her activism among white radicals.
It’s easy. They accept her. But there are differences in emphasis and
prioritizing of issues within these circles that cause her increasing
discomfort. For one thing, there’s a tendency to push dogmas of
“radicalism,” based on contextually specific notions of ideological
purity, that if universally applied, would either discredit or misread
much of the language and strategy used by movements in the global south
and among politically radical communities of color-- communities for
whom capitalism cannot be separated from colonialism, and for whom the
term “nationalism,” though inherently problematic, has a historical
usage linked to liberatory struggle against both. Not least of all,
there’s the assumption that radicalism is expressed through particular
ways of dressing, speaking, acting, eating, thinking and music-making
which are typical of particular white countercultures. These too can
colonize.
On the other hand, among activists of color, to whom such discussions
make sense, her near-universally ascribed identity, along with her
experience of class and skin privilege, often make her presence a
strain. If she tries to act in ways that counter mainstream normativity,
i.e. white cultural hegemony, she may be taken for just another
orientalist commodity fetishizer. It’s happened before. South Asian eyes
range from hostility, to suspicion, to curiosity, to indifference.
Whichever of these it is, she’s not assumed to be part of the “we”. It’s
in white-majority spaces that the inclusive assumption is made, and
there she feels like a dissembler, telling half-truths. You think I’m
like you, but I’m not like you. She’s an impostor. A secret agent. She
can go deep undercover and listen to white people say ignorant things
about brown people.
“Blood pressure looks good. Pulse...yes, very good.”
“Achcha,” her not unchauvinistic uncle Vishwanath once pronounced, upon
seeing his brother’s chichi children for the first time. “They’ll have
Indian intellects and American health. A desirable combination.”
(“Thanks. A lot,” said her mom.)
After the nurse has dispensed with the preliminaries and she’s stripped
down to the paper robe, the gynecologist knocks discreetly. As the
doctor adjusts her splayed position on the table and begins the exam,
she makes pleasant conversation.
“I see you’re on the grad student health plan. What’s your field?”
“History.”
“Good for you. Any particular area or period you specialize in?”
“Yes. Colonialism and radical resistance movements in general. Modern
South Asia and the British Empire in particular.”
“Fascinating stuff,” the doctor says with animation. “I’ve read quite a
few books about the Raj. I’m sure this is kind of silly for your level
of knowledge, but PBS is going to be showing The Far Pavilions next
week, in case you want to try and catch it.”
“I’ll definitely look for it.”
She and her sister love lampooning colonial cinema. An actor, the sister
once went to a casting call that specified half-desi/half-white,
attractive female, mid-20s, but they told her she didn’t look ethnic
enough. “This is what it looks like,” she said, storming out. Maybe she
should have worn a bindi, and more eyeliner; isn’t that how they usually
do it in the movies?
“Right now I’m reading Heart of Darkness,” says the doctor. “Have you
read it?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Of course that’s Africa, not India, but...”
“But it applies.”
“It’s blowing my mind. Here, you’re going to feel some pressure for a
minute or two. Is this OK?”
She takes a deep (yogic) breath and nods.
“Relax your muscles a little bit. Everybody wants to tense up right
here. Good. Anyway, I was just reading that part where they’re going up
the river in the boat, and the tribesmen are shooting arrows from the
riverbank. You know the part I mean?”
“Yes, I remember that.” The overhanging jungle, the hot shadows, the
claustrophobia of the sluggish stream. The growing apprehension as one
moves further into the unknown interior of the dark continent. Into the
space of the speculum the doctor inserts a swab. Mistah Kurtz, you in
there? She wants to laugh out loud. If she tried to write this down, the
bluntness of the symbolism would sound crudely inept.
Meanwhile the doctor goes about her business with gentle efficiency.
“Anyway, I just can’t help but be struck by the sheer arrogance of it
all. I mean, the ignorance of the colonizers.” The doctor glances at her
as if prompting further discourse. As if maybe she’ll say something
erudite, perhaps suggest some sources for further reading. She only
grunts assent. There’s metal in her vagina.
“OK, now relax, you’re tensing up again. This is going to feel cold.”
Here comes the information regime, opening her to categorization and
control. Here comes the rational digital medical eye. Here comes the
west up the dark river, creating her identity through its perception.
But it’s a false ID; she’s itchy in the accoutrements of her skin. The
doctor eases out the lubricated instruments and rubber fingers and she
closes. She hears or imagines she hears that distinctive liquid glister
of when you stir macaroni and cheese.
“You can go ahead and get dressed. I’ll be back in a minute.”
She pulls on her jeans and sweatshirt: western, unisex.
Surface and depth: what’s real, what’s true? What did the doctor learn
inside in the dark? Inside, race is irrelevant, with no biological basis
as a valid category. Blood tests and pap smears reveal nothing. Outside,
it’s so much: a social construct by which arbitrary physical markers are
selected in order to assign people to roles in an inequitable system,
which process is then elaborately cloaked in the mystic justifications
of god, state and empire.
“Are you dressed?”
“Yeah, come on in.”
What’s behind the mask, beneath the clothes? It doesn’t matter. Race
politics aren’t about essentialized identity, whether imposed as a
source of oppression or claimed as a source of strength. Race politics
are about power dynamics, and one’s functional role within them. About
structures of privilege and control, and whether one’s actions
perpetuate these structures or break them down-- whoever, whatever,
wherever you are.
After a quick rundown of her options for the latest birth control
products, she is allowed to go. Examination inconclusive. Her official
classification is Other. She’s a free alien. Knowledge cannot cage her.
Truth escapes her.