non sequiturs left and right

(As fair warning, a good amount of future posts will include quotations from articles and novels) With age seems to come an exponential increase of confusion and indifference. Changeing scenery seems to sharpen whatever fragmentation and alienation being experienced at the moment. A few nights ago, I was asked about my dreams, my ambitions. We were sitting at the sky bar of the Park Lane Hilton and at our feet, London by night. The man strumming a guitar, singing Van Morrison's 'Brown-Eyed Girl' seemed grossly out of place amid the chatter of older couples and groups, predominantly anglos dressed in suits, tuxedos, and gowns, the acrid aroma of cigar smoke, bartenders in short black jackets wiping dry champagne flutes, the night lights of London illuminating the darkness outside. A feeling of emptiness. Or clarity. I don't know. The future is not real for me. I don't have dreams because I still don't know what I'm searching for. Yet I find solace in the strangest (or perhaps, the most appropo) places. In the literature and voices I have been reading over the past few weeks. They're all writers of South Asian origin, a fact that is both comforting and unsettling. There is such a strong, yet unconscious desire to identify with something, but that desire is not realised until it is sated. But then comes the fear of losing one's individuality, of being pigeon-holed, categorized, compartmentalized. American. not American. Indian. not Indian. Neither here nor there. Hating one, feeling guilt about desiring the other. Because even that Indian-ness isn't true. Mom is Indian in name only. She may say I am from India but she will never say I am Indian. Where she comes from, the Indians are just another colonizer. Where she comes from there is a special word for Indians, 'skinny oily man'. On bad days, the layers of self-loathing and incomprehensibility take over. On good days, I revel in the ability to appropriate the best from each culture.

I used to try to integrate my overpowering heritage, feel relaxed and easy about it, but I've discovered I'm not supposed to feel integrated and relaxed. It is not only inevitable, it is also perfectly natural for the inheritor of one of the earth's oldest and most complex inheritances to feel fragmented.

- Nayantara Sahgal, The Schizophrenic Imagination

Shizophrenic. Egg-zactly.