Kitchen Chronicle: The Story of My Journey with Didibhai

I did not know cooking when I emigrated to the United States. As a student, the university cafeteria and the local pizza shop sustained me for a while. I had few options and fewer dollars to spend on food. Eventually, after a year and a half of procrastination, I decided to try sporting with culinary skills. It wasn’t an easy transition. Initially, I did not care about the taste, so anything in the microwave with a dash of cumin and turmeric would qualify as ‘Indian’ food for me! I wasn’t too keen on reinventing Bengali food yet, just Indian food that could be conveniently and quickly microwaved! Soon enough, a visit home after my second year, signaled that what I ate and declared to be ‘Indian’ food was not anything remotely close to any cuisine identifiable with the subcontinent. It was just plain laziness on my part and perhaps, a reluctance to admit that food recreates nostalgia. And heartache.

I did not realize then that food can connect time and people in time. That food helps to forget, remember, and recreate. Food Connects.

I started calling Maa more frequently, initially I forayed into rice, lentils, fired (sic) eggs, or fish. After the phase of getting the eggs out before burning them, or firing them completely, or frying the fish before burning myself (!), I adventurously started out with trying cutting vegetables. It wasn’t easy. I had never done it, never watched anyone do it! So, getting fresh cut vegetables and later frozen ones worked for me. So, what went for vegetable kofta in my little apartment was actually mushy frozen veggies that I had planned on as a dish! I was learning, but the curve was really rather steep! I defended my sagging self-esteem by admitting it was the course work that drained me of my ‘culinary skills’!

During this time, Didibhai, my maternal grandmother, came to stay with my family. Telephone calls got lengthier since I wanted to talk to her as well. She was a wizard in the kitchen, from Indian to Mughlai, from jellies and preserves to fritters, from dairy based desserts to flour based ones, from cakes to kulfi, she had it all on her fingertips. I depended on this oral knowledge transfer, you tube had just been born and Indian recipes, videos, and blogs were few and far between at the time. For me, Didibhai bridged cultures of cooking while happily substituting online knowledge.

Initially, I was tutored on the various spices and when to add them whole, when to grind them fresh, and when to just use them as garnish. A summer during my third year, went by getting spice jars and spices shipped to me from Kolkata, or those that journeyed in friends’ suitcases smelling of home. I remember organizing the kitchen around spices, utensils, skillets, and pans. I was getting interested in this business. It was fun to spend time in the kitchen outside of work! I even ventured to the public library in my town and took a look at books on food. I was growing an interest in food. In my understanding of cooking, I was simultaneously developing another level of intimacy with Didibhai.

With her commentary, I gradually learnt how to use the knife; mincing, slicing, cubing, and chopping were words suddenly having meaning, shape, and size in my cognition. My refrigerator had fresh vegetables, fish, and meat, instead of takeout boxes, hardened pizzas waiting to be trashed, and bags of frozen vegetables that were never going to be used! I had discovered the kitchen. Outside of work, the kitchen was my space to chill out. I almost likened myself to a scientist at the lab, only my work space was slightly different! During this time, Didibhai gave me recipes using no spices, 1 or 2 spices, or even those that could use a variety of spices during different phases of their preparation. I learnt how to make varieties of shuktos. I learnt it with ground mustard and milk, or the one with celery seed (radhuni) and five spices (panch phoron), the one with fish, and the one with leftover vegetables. I processed her recipes to recreate them my way. Innovations with “how I cook Indian food” started. I actually gained enough confidence (with my cooking skills) after my 4th year here to volunteer at a food meet during International Student’s festival. I had, indeed, come some way in my culinary journey.

I kept up phone conversations with Didibhai long after she went back to her home. We now joked about the secret book of her recipes that I will inherit! It was somewhere and we chatted about it. Didibhai’s skills were still eons outside of my level, but in my own way, I thought I recreated her ideas in my kitchen every day. She gained significance during the period I started to date. My fiancé, a food connoisseur and expert chef, wanted to test me on my skills. Over a restaurant meeting, I decided to invite him for a home cooked meal. Our first meal at home together started with watermelon punch—Didibhai’s idea for her would-be grandson-in-law. It was Memorial Day, warmer than usual, and the punch with crushed ice, lemon slices, a dash of rock salt sealed our relationship. I think Didibhai just knew what would work for me! Maybe, she had a story in the creation of the punch somewhere, maybe it would connect my warm Memorial Day meeting with another warm day during her youth…

Time flies. And it has been over a decade since that first meeting.

As we grow our relationship, we have continued to experiment with food and cuisine in the kitchen.  Iranian spice mix, Moroccan couscous, or Spanish paella, our culinary borders keep expanding. I cannot disregard Didibhai’s role in triggering my enthusiasm. The food plurality that binds us together made me design my first senior level class on food and identity. Maybe, I was hoping to find similar narratives like mine in the students I met and interacted with. Sure enough, I heard stories of Haitian grandmothers’ stew recipes, of Jewish chulent recipes during Sabbath, Guyanese recipes using cumin and saffron, food narratives from all across the world seemed to have animated every class that I taught. From bridging portals of home, work, personal and professional worlds, Didibhai remained ever present. Her food stories and expertise could de-stress me and let me begin all over again. Our phone conversations had come under a schedule, however, a short trip back to Kolkata, always meant handmade delicacies from her kitchen—to eat and carry back.

Didibhai left us last year.

Oftentimes, after a long day at work, I remember our joke about the book of her secret recipes. I had by this time realized that the book of recipes was Didibhai. She was the text, the secret of all the recipes, of all the foods I will ever create in my kitchen. A jar of her last mango preserve sits in my refrigerator. I hesitate to consume it. I can feel her presence, her touch, her love in the preserves. And, I want to hold on to it. I realize that it has a limited shelf life yet I am fiercely guarding it from time, unconsumed. As I write this, I realize Didibhai is in my kitchen and in the memories that my food creates of her. She is renewed through the food we discovered together, and these renewals keep the journey of food and people forever throbbing.

 

 

Not yet. Home…

In a piece I intend to write of home, I increasingly remain baffled by my searing desire to write about homelessness. I am at home, writing about home, yet I seem to dwell on the seeming homelessness of my self. Home always means an address, a dwelling place that connects anyone to a geography of belonging. Known landscapes, streets, smells, sights, sounds, and people. It is the people who always make one dwell, stay on. Live with a place.

 

My earliest memories transpire around a 6×10 room. The room of my adolescence and early youth; the room which taught me to leave and stay. Live and dwell. That room. It was the mezzanine of my father’s house in Kolkata. It was a storage room when I moved in and claimed it. Windows never opened, stacks of old magazines, comic books that had lost their shiny covers, but carried gossamer memories of kids who had once fought over them, notebooks with Mom’s notes from her college lectures, picture books inherited from grandmothers, books in all the languages we spoke in at home—English and Bengali. It was dusty but had the potential to house me, if I made peace with the lack of space it had. And, so I began digging out for space.

 

A makeshift box holding old books served as my chair, a small table lamp for light, and a rickety table of my paternal grandfather sealed my entry into the room, gradually. It was bare of ceiling fans, light fixtures; it held up the glories of my parents’ past lives to me to discover every day and purge out. It had their books, their notes; the redundancy of their past lives that echoed from each corner of that room.   I started to clear space, encroaching the storage area. I started populating the walls with stickers, pictures torn off old calendars, popular film magazines, and tabloids. Posters, stamps, images, and quotes were glued on; fans, light fixtures, a stereo system, bookshelves, and a small bed later, my room got a character just like its occupant.  I was clearing out the space my parents had filled in with their past lives, before me, without me. I was making space for me. My mom’s notebooks were eventually catalogued and put away in the attic, dad’s memorabilia found a shelf, magazines and newspapers were disposed off by the kilogram—taking off in the large dirty white cloth bags of newspaper walas and magazine collectors. I was claiming space and trying to position the room as mine. Is that how occupations began? Is that how one generation’s past piles up in a corner of another’s present?

 

I was unsure at the time. I did not venture yet to think back and reflect on my actions. I was more intent on claiming and re-owning a space. A 6×10 room.

 

A good part of the adolescent self was spent dreaming, plotting, and remaking the walls of the room. I opened up the windows, dusted out the cobwebs, and spent time inhabiting and claiming the room’s energy as it melded into mine. Was that my home? I had only displaced some memories and created others in its place. Was it then like a quilt? Lined up with the stories of people who shared the 4-walls of the 6×10? With pages of poetry, fiction, scrapbooks, and journals later, I entered into early adulthood. In that same room, my friends came up to meet me: in search of an idea, in search of a goal, in pursuit of a mission to define my life with. In that room, I cried my first heartbreak, felt the first crush, and housed my first secret—away from the rest of the house and its occupants. Disappointments, milestones, reality checks, heartaches, and heartbreaks, no matter what, that room was home to a world that failed to get what I was all about. I was homed in that room. It grew me.

 

But rooms and homes seldom remain. It did not for me. Perhaps, I had started to outgrow my 6×10 existence and started to dream out, dream bigger…perhaps.

 

So, with budding young adulthood, I was increasingly out of the room. I wrote my first job application, got my first job, and opened my first scholarship letter in that room. When I moved out, I dreamt about the room. The people featured too, but what appeared most were my stages of slow but steady occupancy of the room. It was my nesting place after a long, hard day. I was home there. When I came back from work, and later, when I moved out of town, the room became an internal part of the entire house. It was always “Her room” to the other members of my family when I occupied it most of the time. Later, when I started to come back to the room, after work, after my out of site job, it slowly became “The upstairs room.” I had moved out—of the room and out of the house too. Although, I unconsciously never left the room, I realized in the new change of term, that my leaving had a permanency about it. The room had accepted that I had left. And so had the people elsewhere about the house.

 

A few years later, I went overseas and started a new chapter of my life. The rooms I lived in never came to my dreams. They were part of a reality I was constructing by myself. I don’t quite recall the roomscape of that first living situation I moved into, in the US. Was the window to the left? How many steps to the room, right side of the house or left? Did it have imprints of its earlier occupants? My conscious memories do not let me recall the character of the rooms I moved into. Student housing, community housing, private 1-bedroom, I stayed in those addresses and those locations, only to find I had forgotten them the moment I started living in a new place. The temporariness of these rooms, those houses never bothered me, I had always thought of the original room, that little shack—that storage area converted into a living space, as my dwelling place.

 

That first time when I went back for a visit, the room did not stick out to me. Its character had changed with the person who currently inhabited it. Where were my images, posters, and calendars? My memories? Were my stamp collections and scrapbooks still there? I had been swiftly replaced. Unclaimed. A youth lived outside of digital archives, I found myself increasingly engulfed by the reality of not being there, not persisting in time. The room had purged me out of it. There were still dust and cobwebs though. I just wondered if these were the same cobwebs I had left behind? Or, were they from times generations past, occupants renting out these tiny webs, only to find others taking them over. With time. Were these the same homes for the tiny insects that never relocated?

 

The room simply stared back at me with a clinical precision that screamed, “upstairs room.” I had moved out. I could not feel me in the room and exited it, speechless. Was this the slow dawning and absorbing truth that things pass on? Was it the internalization that I had moved on from the room and that it was the dwelling of someone else now? Was I incapable of feeling that the room had also grown out of me? I don’t know. Years later, in my study in a different room, in a different place, on a street I have walked through everyday, I still feel the transcience of a dwelling.

 

For people who move out, for people who move on, is there a dwelling ever? I can’t stop feeling homeless every time I step into the room I live in now; and, when I go back to a room left behind in time and distance, I realize how the room stopped responding to me which once felt like I breathed in it… 20 years on, I move from one room to the next, in search of a dwelling, a nesting, and fall back thinking of that first home that never stopped being mine but never stayed mine.

Dreams of my Mother: Birthday Foodscapes and Me

“Begin with the bitter first. Then go to the fritters and the fries. Finally, exit through the rice pudding,” advised Maa as I made my headway through the once a year coveted birthday meal. The most challenging item on the bowls surrounding my plate would be the mammoth deep-fried fish-head. The deep-fried fish head was for special occasions, birthday meals, especially cooked by Maa, were super special. Even though the fish-head looked invincible, I awaited its presence on my plate. Some of the prowess in rightly attacking the head, I believed, sealed my entry into food lore amongst the siblings keenly observing the battleground strategy!  So, beginning first with the bitters, I launched an attack. For me, a Fall-born daughter of October, it was always the typical Bengali dish made with a bittersweet vegetable stew called shukto that made the cut. Milky, translucent, sweet, bitter, and creamy with ghee, it came with root vegetables, such as sweet potatoes, long beans, drumsticks, bitter melon, plantains, eggplants, among others to lend its distinct flavor. That began the midday meal. In food lore, if one perfects shukto, one can feed the culinary gods. I was only mortal!   

After I slurped through the special stew, fritters and fries followed with daal, usually a special item with mung. A king-sized potato sliced thinly or sometimes hand-cut into paper-thin strips, and then deep-fried were served. I remember plantain fries, pumpkin fries, the humble parval fry, and the special bori or dry pasted spiced lentil fries mixed with fresh leaved sautéed spinach. From the vegetarian’s delight to the pescatarian’s, my next stop would be a diamond-cut fish fry adorning my plate’s side. It was a feast meant to make me feel like a queen, even if for one day in a year, cooked by Maa’s divine skills. Then came the majestic whole fry of a fish head, usually the carp, soaking in the juice of mustard oil, fish oil, and Maa’s special touch. It looked menacing. Seldom have I dismissed its presence, although it had always eluded my skills. Nonetheless, I lavished it all; sometimes, the leftover fries went to my little sister, who sat down with me and waited with a reciprocal understanding that some of the fritters and the fish head were surely coming over to her plate.   

After the initial ambush through vegetables and lentils, came the fish. Maa stood guard over me, making sure that every item went into my plate in the correct order in which it needed to be eaten. I got a rap on my hands if I reached for the chutney before finishing the meal, or for the glass of water half-way through it. I was reminded that she had been cooking this up in the kitchen the most parts of the day. Baba usually went to work or remained missing from weekday afternoon birthday meals. So, Maa caught up with his part of the reminders too! Anyways, the fish occupied the second half of the meal. There could not be a birthday meal without a minimum of 3-4 fish items. Thus, there was the ilish in a rich mustard gravy, the bhekti in a tomato based red curry, the parshe in a light mustard sauce-based gravy, and the everyday carp or rohu in a concoction of milk, cashew nuts, and raisins. If I were lucky that year, there was the king prawn in coconut gravy. It was an affair where I was made to realize that my birthday mattered, more to me, for me than to anyone else.  In my foodlogue through the birthday meal, most of the fish stayed untouched. The meat was traditionally out of the birthday meal. If I barely managed to chew through the parshe, the bhekti and the carp remained unacknowledged. The side bowls were put away intact into the refrigerator. The next morning, they would be served again. Maa believed that fish items cooked for the daughter should only go to her. She was open to waiting while avoiding the transfer of culinary goodies onto another member of the household.  

After my pathetic show with the fish, I looked to the humble chutney, my Maa’s signature tomato-dried mango-dates chutney. It was sweet, savory, and deliciously thick with just the right kind of a hint of heat. The jewel in the crown of such a birthday meal was the payesh. A porridge with sweetened milk and rice in a heavenly symphony that eased into the spoon, left a thick coating of greasy, milk fat, and slithered down the throat in an explosion of sweetness coming from the special soft rice that went into its creation, the gobindobhog. The payesh sealed my entry into the next year in a burst of delicious nostalgia, looking forward to the next birthday, the next meal, the next bowl of payesh. 

School days during birthdays could be given a miss unless there was a scheduled test. If I had to be in school, a shorter version of the meal would be served, often excluding shukto, payesh, and the various fish items. It was a deglamorized version of the promise of the meal to come after I came home to the entirely of the meal. If the midday meal could be traditionally carried out, Maa made sure I had my forehead adorned with sandalwood motifs, usually leaf and flower designs. She made sure that I sat down to eat my birthday meal with folded legs on the asana or the handwoven cloth mat she laid on the floor since the formal dining area was off-limits that day. After a well-deserved afternoon nap, the birthday evening bought phone calls with my birthday finery, usually a formal frock. My cousins, aunts, uncles from my father’s side, and my grandparents called me. We discussed the meal I had had, elaborating on the birthday attire I had on, while they blessed me repeatedly.   

Birthday night meant no rice. It is usually served with puffed flour cakes called luchis with a delicious and spicy potato curry, another vegetable fry not from the morning meal, a Bengali sandesh, and another deep Bengali sweet was my favorite, a kalojaam. Dinner was simple, austere, and made sure that I ate my way through it. Birthday cakes were recent habits, growing out of the culture that cannot replace the old-world charm of a meal cooked from beginning to end by Maa. Metaphorically speaking, my birthday cake was created every year by Maa. Working at her kitchen, Maa imbibed the traditional foods that made me feel especially loved for the rest of the year.   

In the many orbits I have taken around the sun, none match those simple, close to the heart meals cooked by Maa. In my kitchen, I have never been able to create the consistency of the payesh that she made or match the richness of the shukto that began the meal. As I journey ahead, enriching the life of blessings from my circle of family, I fall back to remember those birthday moments. In attending themed birthday parties with Amazon made–to–order Little Mermaid or Frozen cakes, candles, tinsels, musical cards, and digital collages, with the cornucopia of glamour and digitization, none match the symphony of the theme that Maa created on my birthdays, every year. Me. 

 

A Divided Reality

 

I fear. The reality of existing without my familiar group of friends scares me. I fear being left to myself, exclusive of a group where I have my comrades from days long since gone. You see, friendships are an important chapter to my existence. When we are adults bridging work, life, friendships, families, the necessary nesting place that friendships provide, anchor us to our memories from the past and the moments we spent together in time, at present, looking to the future. For me, these past friendships, born at the time one realizes one needs to belong, is significant and seminal to my sense of fellowship. They began, for me, in kindergarten. We were young, untried humans then.  

Our politics was easy to figure; we sat together, read together, stumbled, played, and picked up each other, comforted ourselves. Together. We fiercely guarded our secrets and shared them only in each other’s company. We were cruel too, tying grasshoppers with strings, mimicking older neighbors, cooking excuses to skip school and play outside, stealthily returning to our homes after rummaging through yards and trampling over flower beds. We were young and in a group. Together in winning and making everything our own, our secrets were simple but not harmful. It involved full blooded confessions of eating  extra cake when no one was looking, grabbing a brother’s book bag and dipping it in water, pulling out mom’s blouse from her closet and ‘playing’ mom when she was out, or dressing up like dad to play him, even if for a tiny second. Our secrets we guarded, our secrets we carried. Together. Past elementary to middle to high schools. We were friends and remained so. By that time, our secrets were about our growing bodies, the opposite sex, and the way our parents refused to see anything of sense in us. Those that moved and changed states, remained alive in letters, cards, and notes that came by in the mail. We were connected. In a childhood and adolescence spent out of digital archives, our letters, messages, and texts carried us forward. Helped us reunite and plan reunions, sometimes.  Our sense of being together transpired around those secrets. Friends knew what fellowship was, we did things together, and thought we had the world to win.  

As life progressed and some of us became professionals and family people, the old fire of our friendship kindled differently and tore at our hearts differently. At least, it did for me. There was, of course, that old familiarity that tickled me amidst the busy work-life schedule I had. That old fire that kindled even after long years of separation when I spoke to a friend, when we chatted, met, called, or face timed. Those moments where all the time lost between friends were quickly bridged by a conversation, 20 years later…We were again together, wrapped in our tiny world when we were young again. Young and, perhaps, innocent.  

But that camaraderie lasted just until 2014-2016. In my mind, alienation and a feeling of utter loss, the feeling of my being friendless could be dated. At least, for me and my shell-shocked self, they were. For suddenly, the people I had grown up with, my community, old sinners for life, were exposed. Childhood never led us to know the essential part of us that held on to a static sense of belonging anchored to one identity. Childhood meant having an unadulterated faith in each other and knowing the person outside of their imposed upon state-given socio-cultural identity. Now, these identities have suddenly morphed into their political personas where culture and belonging do not mesh; suddenly we have been compartmentalized into binaries of religion, nationality, and language identities. Suddenly, the Janus head of difference has spread like wildfire amongst my group of friends. It has left some of us rattled, some of us complacent, and someone like me, alone.  

By myself.  

Suddenly realizing that I have fallen out of friendships, fallen out of place to belong with this group of infectious individuals I call friends. I can no longer sit down with my friends from days past, reminiscing how it was growing up. Our memories bottled up forever, because now we meet people who have become strangers to each other. Believing in extremities of belonging with an intolerance to difference. How can I find myself again amongst friends, people who can belong everywhere with everybody—just like when we were growing up? 

In my social media Whatsapp friends from childhood group, for instance, I find myself getting quickly sucked into the quagmire of feisty conversations where arguments mean un-affiliation from a group, where arguments cannot coexist, where feelings of inclusion can only be cemented if you excluded other identities from the group. The conclave we created, with friends about friends, has suddenly transfigured itself into this malformed creature that carves identity by its blood lust in demonizing and separating other people with other identities and in other groups on the basis of religion, faith, nationality, and language. Were we born like this? What is this new crisis in our relationship about? Is this ‘new’? Will it tear us apart? Will we stand together in solidarity, and be aware of who we are, and then communicate from that space? Will we be empathetic human beings?  

Every morning when I wake up and wait to find a message lurking to haunt my ethical and moral compass that forces me to question my sense of belonging both to my group of friends and to the greater world, it brings me to a dilemma—a moral encounter that I am not keen on revisiting. I fear my alienation from my friends. With a necessary part of my self, evolving in their presence, I feel I might never know that part again, nor reminisce about it, without my comrades. Where are they? Why has the obsession of exclusive belonging mired our time present? With each other? Why?  

I fear the time when I find a friend gloating in their support of hate, prejudice, and difference. Are these the same people I grew up with? What makes me fall out of pace with them? How did I fall out of that group? And, how did they fall in pace with their terrain of exclusivity? With that alienation, comes the gnawing feeling that I might have belonged to the same group as a child bullying, cheering, and hurting other kids, other people, without realizing. Were we always like this? When did I separate out? Then, had I never belonged? Was I always really, friendless? I fear that realization.  

I fear being left out of friends. I get further terrified when I think of the moment when I separated and they stayed together, maybe, that was when, without my cognitive understanding, I was severed from the root of my friendships. Maybe, that was the time, when they grouped together and left me out. Maybe, that’s when I had become that child who sat alone and was left alone without friends? Metaphorically, I visualize myself as that child who never realized the core of her friendships and got mixed up, keeping up the myth of being with friends and being popular. Only, to have that feeling of concreteness, demolished as an adult—I was always without friends, at least in the deepest core, because how would they have turned out such opposites while I stayed different than them? What then was the common ground between us? I fear my ignorance clouding over my common sense, like it did then.  

I was friendless. I fear finding myself, waking up to the harsh reality of finding me all by myself-losing out an essential part of who I am…and not knowing if my difference can make me feel belonged. Once again.  

For now, I fear my friendlessness and ponder on the actuality of our being children who were never really innocent and guileless? Were we? Really? I fear to find out. I fear to go back and rethink this all over again... 

White Mediocrity!

The structure and culture protecting and celebrating the mediocrity of whiteness and/or white masculinity is upheld and maintained by white women and POC. It replicates a power structure that controls and maintains status quo. Aligning with this mediocrity does not make any one any powerful or any white, although, it incites such a feeling. Disrupt this alliance and point out this mediocrity whenever you can. The disruption will be transgressive, of course, you may be labeled a ‘trouble maker’ and miss those brownie point in evaluations and promotional matters, but your disruption will eventually foster a system of diversity of thought, competency, and efficiency. Let’s own the system instead of playing its gatekeepers. I advocate for feminist network groups of solidarity with the integrity to call out mediocrity and its allies from either side that helps sustain this system and uses diversity quotient to boost the injections of federal dollars, only.  

Sara Ahmed’s “Phenomenology of Whiteness” and “Feminist Killjoy” importantly draws on the question of entitlement and whiteness and feminist disruption within academic spaces. I want to further her notion by arguing about the intersections of spaces of privilege with spaces of manipulation, strategies that uphold and sustain the system of white, patriarchal and heteromasculine mediocrity.  

Algorithms in our Academic Facebook

-An Academic Insider

 

Under ideal circumstances, the existence of social media platforms and their strong network creating abilities may help integrate a greater diversity of perspectives, opinions, and community mechanisms than are promised within the individual, institutional structures. As I started observing and being critical of the entire system and framework that social media platforms, such as Facebook, provide, I expected to see a more significant play of perceptions of fairness, inclusion, and equity dynamics informing all of these networks. I presumed that these networking systems and communities will result in creating spaces that house open-sourced information, academic knowledge, publications, tools, metrics, and methodologies that are debated openly, inclusively, and creatively. In its microcosmic avatar, it seemed like Facebook simply replicates and cedes to existing hierarchies despite emerging voices. The establishment is recreated and revamped in this digital space even, as the community and its potentially ameliorative practices of interaction and collaboration, are hinted at.

 

I mainly focused on the liberal arts and humanities groups on social media as intentional communities ideally meant to sustain intellectual cohesion. I see the groups to catalyze collaborative frameworks, adhere to a broadly structured common belief that fosters academic discussions enabling inclusivity, diversity, and interactive collaboration. The tensions I observed, however, replicate the politics of conservative blocs and abhor the evolution of collective, diverse wisdom. I share below the various group habits that characterize the nature of academic Facebook. I simulate the language of algorithms to code how it functions.

 

 

Academic (Liberal Studies and Humanities) Facebook: social media→ academic and social space for discussion ∧ includes personal posts occasionally

 

Netizens/Audience→ includes all interested Higher Ed individuals.

 

Intent→ Ideally having meaningful and inclusive discussions: academic, political, cultural, social. Improve academic networking skills in an online space. Grow spaces for intercollegiate collaborations and forums. Here I am using the term ‘safe spaces’ to refer to both queer/trans-inclusive spaces while referring to areas that equip intellectual growth without intimidation. Toxic behavioral patterns including bullying, shaming, isolating and other online mechanics of divisiveness were presumably going to be abhorred in these spaces. Many academics feel shunned in predominantly majoritarian academic spaces where intimidatory tactics are strategically used. As a reactionary mechanism, some form “Binders” groups, some stay out, some form groups outside of social media, and go gung-ho with other supportive platforms, such as WhatsApp or private email groups. Then there are the fence-sitters, they believe in safe playing regardless of their faculty/employment status.

 

Netiquette→ personal posts can be liked, but be selective in posting; self-promote, advertise, fundraise, and show the world how you excel in *everything. Gather a group of eager followers and keep going!

 

Observations→ academic Facebook replicates academic insecurities and cronyism; it is a microcosm of pro-establishment definitions of an intellectual and meaningful discussion space. It denounces out-of-the-box thinking, especially by juniors in the field. The enactment of academic cronyism, enabling academic nepotism and insecurities play out in this online space. No happy stories of inclusivity or equal collaborations characterize this space. In fact, academic impunity contingent on rank and academic celebrityhood, makes this digital space insecure, exclusive, and hierarchically ranked just like in real-life. The academics who command social media following belong to the same blocs of thought that uphold a certain kind of power structure and inhabit a similar sort of fan following that is specially reserved for them. Mentoring junior colleagues, opening a collegial conversation, or leading by inclusion is passé. The same exclusive groups hold cult status and recreate the same hierarchy that these digital spaces may seem to challenge.

 

Types:

 

Compartmental Academic Blocs→ Area studies folxs in one group, followed by cultural studies, history, political science, literary studies, literature, sciences, technologies, economists, etc. Library sciences and interdisciplinary folx? : eff off! Disciplines overrepresented primarily include area studies. Liberal arts disciplines such as English, Philosophy, History, Social Work, or Comparative Literatures, share a more extensive audience group than other more ‘reticent’ subjects, such as Education, Psychology, and Library Sciences. Friends, mentors, exclusive clichés, and fan clubs populate these pages. Membership is through word of mouth, ‘subject to the approval of group admin’ (code for past acquaintances and professional relationships, and/or institutional affiliation). They are also primarily enacted in the cis, white, upper-middle class, or elite spaces.

 

The swamp→ 4-year liberal arts faculty are routinely snubbed or disregarded by elite academic club members, either under academic clout, or school ranking, or school of thought identified with, or all three combined. The swamp recreates elite educational structures based on an invisible academic caste-system! It routinely promises to make space and support junior and upcoming faculty, keep up with their compartments, and fall back on their solidarity promises without the slightest professional scruple.

Thus, groups of visiting faculties, graduate students, aspiring HigherEd faculty, 2-year College faculty, retired and emeritus faculty, faculty on non-tenure-track are cast off. They are faculty colleagues who routinely serve as the proverbial footnote, if at all, unacknowledged. For most parts, they are an invisible citizenry. Some of these cast-offs have grouped differently: Binders are what they call themselves. These boxes sometimes follow the coda of secretive reinforcement of group values and mimic supremacist structures. At other times, they provide restful shelter to faculty seeking solidarity and good old camaraderie.

 

Divas and Devis→ Academic fan clubs routinely nominate academic divas known for their attitudes and tantrums worded in abstruse high falutin. Reactions range from crankiness to snobbery rooted in the cult status they enjoy! Like their real world academic occupancy, these cult figures seldom retire from these digital spaces. They uphold a set of values that aspiring sycophants hold dear to themselves. Usually centered on white, male, cisgender gurus, they reproduce academic status quo and hierarchy. If the cult status is not under a white guru, the diva taking over from the nonwhite group is an aspirational white! White support, white mollycoddling keeps them in standing. Their diva/devi persona utilizes their so-called cult status for a kind of conservative protectionism that routinely parades itself as woke and rad! Competitive memberships to these groups are often decided on the number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ you put on their personal profile page!

 

Publication/Conference group room→ if you are with your junkies and contemporaries, the calls for papers are not publicized: you get included if you ‘belong’ to that group. If it’s an academic conference, these netizens make sure their friends present papers where their ideas are reinforced and become axioms. Their publication clubs also perennially promote and advocate for voices that belong to their particular school of thought. Academic clichés simulate the real in the digital space as well. The cesspool promoting more snobbery and elitism is not unobtrusive, but just glaring! The nuance and sophistication with which junior faculty are glossed over, their posts shared without acknowledgments, their comments adapted without a side-eye even, and the general invisibility of BIPOC womyn and their intellectual and academic thoughts, are noteworthy. Senior and establishment academics don’t even think junior and upcoming faculty have anything worthwhile to contribute if it is not fan following, ‘likes,’ and emojis of adoration. If you do happen to fall out of luck by engaging with these posts/posters without so much giving them a sycophantic thumbs up, you are sure to land up in a space populated by a specially toxic group metaphorically likened to “Reviewer2”, a space reserved for an uncritical and biased group of people ready to dismiss you for being you.

 

Racial and Ethnic blocs→ usually most discussions on social inclusion (and critiques on exclusion) are initiated by BIPOC womyn folx, but limited within the groups following the compartmental bloc mentioned above! Academic hierarchy reproduces itself without any nuances. Men snub womyn, Black women get excluded by Black men and men in general, WOC gets snubbed or disregarded by their counterparts and white men. For queer-identifying colleagues, they get excluded from discussions on inclusions and in critical reading and writing practices. The few trans individuals get labeled as ‘privileged!’ In the academic circus, academic meanness gets overrepresented. For that, academic Facebook provides a ready stage! If you are a BIWOC or nonbinary identifying academic, prepare to get snubbed for your viewpoints, ignored, or reminded of your ‘mediocrity’! Again, compartmental clichés and elite isolationist groups rule the roost. Likely, kinds of viewpoints that do not affirm the status quo are ignored or snubbed. To be in the choir, you must sign the right tune. Presumably, your identity category stamps your specific belonging to this digital group, as does your intellectual input.

 

Self-Righteous/’fashionable’ liberal group bloc→ This bloc of members subscribing to this ideology are the flagbearers of righteous indignation. Often characterized by posts focused on news items or discussion threads on public and social welfare. The fashionable liberals have compartmental discussions on the issues posted, continue publishing stuff unrelated to social media online outrage, and wear badges of honorary sainthoods. They are outraged by everything everywhere but claim no ownership of that outrage! They are cautiously mindful of who is following them and who is commenting. They start their ‘anger exhibit’ group/compartment/bloc based on selective outrage. Here, academic hypocrisy and exhibitionism, a fierce loyalty underlying “go liberal to be woke” ideology colors every moral and intellectual compass. If you are looking for academics’ integrity, you go bust!

 

Rats and Snitches blocs →This comprises a few administrators and academic tattlers, keeping an eye on Fb posts to rat out faculty (mostly WOC, non-binary, BDS supportive, etc.). This is the group that police faculty behavior, usually ratting out the ‘disruptive’ colleague who makes the most uncomfortable but ethical comments on race, identity, and questions the politics of representation. This group functions as a rebound mechanism trying to ‘discipline’ unruly and ‘radical’ digital spaces by snitching on faculty and colleagues who seem to be non-conformative in their beliefs and politics. Screenshots are regularly taken to either get the concerned Facebook member to Facebook jail or present them to authorities that rally for some other form of the punitive measure. In any case, this online policing group represents the force that simulates the policing mechanism that throttles academic freedom and dissent in the real world.

 

Intellectuals and Such-likes→ Composed of seasoned establishment academics, this group is different than the “fashionably liberal group” above. This group is a possible offshoot of the diva/cult group. They spit out their thoughts and are not ready to see through any other perspective. Absolutionists in their own way, they keep up the swamp and are gung-ho about academic establishments while crying hoarse about conservative politics! They subscribe to the cancel culture and advocate for “free speech” only if they are not countered! The holier than thou attitude of these intellectuals and their spitfire attitudes give them a sense of invincibility, anything they say, no matter how daft, must be taken in. Argue at your own peril!

 

Insecure sycophants→ they try to survive by trying to agree with everything peddled by the swamp. Frequently, allyship is lost if agreeing with one master runs the risk of angering another. Poor souls! Usually junior, un/non-tenured, or graduate student individuals, insecure sycophants seek validity and credence; sometimes, it could be a publication with a journal from the same club they want entry into, sometimes it’s a favorable review they seek, at other times, perhaps a recommendation? In all probability, these are folks who seek entry into the exclusivity and enable the replication of the real structure of academic cronyism.

 

Summative Results →we are where we started off. Group centric interests keep us from reaching out, collaborate, form coalitional and active support groups for each other. There is nothing to learn unless it is top-down and nothing to talk about unless you get your five minutes of social media fame! The imaginary participatory liberal democratic space we write and talk about is best where it is, to get us published. In the digital world, we stand in line to support academic cult figures, with an unquestioning fan following, while promoting academic hierarchies and cronyism. We feel proud when we are spared being seen with X rather than with Y, depending on who is more fashionable and on the right side of the establishment!

 

My Comments→ Knowledge-making, networking, creatively connecting online and in the higher education circle is exclusive, shuns innovative new thoughts if they are resistant or new to the traditional academic bloc of thinking. If they are somehow agreeable enough, senior and swamp group identified academics ‘adopt’ them as their own. Juniors bite the dust and form their private groups that soon flounder without supportive alliance from the establishment groups. The nature of disillusionment and betrayal by academic spaces does not start with the geographical academic institution, it starts right here, on your phone, in your academic, social media page!

 

Restorative Spaces→ So, is there a digital therapy room possible? Where are these spaces? I am mindful of the supportive, recuperative spaces, less hostile, and more open spaces in private Binders group, in private chat rooms, and in a body of people called “allies and friends.” Sometimes they are your peers, sometimes the people you went to school with. They get you alright. They hold you tight and make sure they hear you out. There are disagreements for sure, but there is a camaraderie that the hostilities and the bullying sideroads of academic Facebook cannot stifle. It is those spaces that continue to sustain faculty like me and many others. That celebrates our little joys, pick us up, and hold us tight to see another chance waiting. There’s this invisible and underlying web of support that we actively create and maintain, the limited twilight spaces that continue to foil the negative culture at the center of academic Facebook. The alliances and advocacies we foster and embrace in these spaces keep us afloat, maybe they are the humane institutions that inspire us to continue to do the work we are doing. The ruthlessness of academic Facebook cannot undercut this ‘small place,’ which for most of us is our own slice towards growth and development.

 

 

 

Being Liberal After Nov. 8, 2016…

So one of my ‘fashionably liberal’ colleagues writes about how the President-elect does not read books through. Apparently, this is of utmost interest to reading-writing teachers? For me, a scared ‘hyper-reacting’ woman of color, this liberalism carefully dodges realizing (however remotely) [scratching head here, *you either realize or you don’t* Still, lets say I am hopeful for a realization dawning somewhere soon], the reality of people who are being targeted by other people in the name of the President-elect.

This target population feels threatened, mortally afraid, and some are even traumatized to report hateful incidents. These other people are not just writing teachers, they may be people with whom you interact (by not interacting) everyday—on your way to work, working your yard, taking care of your child, elderly parent, in your classes, driving buses. Who knows if they really think of a President-elect who reads or does not, for to these people, staying alive and getting home without a racial slur thrown at them for being here is the start of a blessing?

 

Perhaps, elitism and classism keep racisms and honest conversations on race from happening? But then liberal values may have now come to mean being in tune with the hip and the happening, right? And so, armchair, fashionable liberalism is a support-mechanism that has a use, a benefit for you. It can bolster you to promote your writing skills and intellectual ability/-ities in writing a book on marginality, speak on prime time TV on the common condition, it can help you get a raise, get full professorship, get rewarded, funded, have a social media following, and be the star-persona with the liberal thought!

 

It does not really make you empathetic and capable of associating with the real pain of the people you see (or choose not to). It does not make you realize that you are privileged because you are you, protected by your elite and fashionable liberal values. Eluded by the reality that does not touch you. Yet.

 

Another colleague calls for “apologies” “love” and “I am so so sorry,” in response to a first-grader being bullied and told to “go back where she came from.” Redolent of the white guilt you’d have to revisit—the guilt you acknowledge and apologize about but refrain from doing anything about—in an endlessly simplistic complicity of “its not me who did it!”

 

Another calls for defending her voting rights, “I voted democrat through and through.” And, you realize, the conversation is not really about voting rights and ballot choices. At all. Not all of us voted. But, all of us are here. Now. That the conversation is about real people and the reality of their lives, which become even more precarious when suddenly emboldened radicalized groups think they are in some kind of purging rampage.

 

As you come out of these sane ‘liberal bastions,’ feeling more than rattled and even more disconnected, you realize that it is a tough call to delink the radical from the ideology of exclusivity to the fashionably liberal, displaying a privileged nonchalance more dangerous than those that articulate it. The message you hear is loud and clear, in solidarity with you but when it suits me; in compassion but without tenderness, and together without feeling and empathy.

 

Indeed, the possibilities for ethical repositionings that can inform our empathies with others unlike us has become more and more remote. As the day predictably wanes for most, the task of soul-searching and thinking hard about the politics of being liberal becomes more daunting. Maybe, really interacting with people from outside our comfort zones can expose us to moments of actually being able to see the processes of starting to *really be with them?*

 

Forward…