I can’t lie, I’ve been marinating in my thoughts for a few months now and have written very little, so I’m feeling a little rusty. Like, how do you do this again? How do you start? How do you convince yourself that these precious little ideas you have about life are worth penning down and blasting off to other people’s inboxes? A strange thing about me is that I hate to be vulnerable in front of other people. In front of other people, I am often not a feelings type of girl(!) (I’m attempting an essay on performance of good/bad womanhood, send duas please) But I also cannot help it, despite my best efforts, to be vulnerable in my writing, which is why I’ve had a blog on the internet for as long as I can remember, in some shape or form. It’s actually surprising to me that my first novel (still in progress, in case you were wondering) is not more autobiographical. I mean, in a way it does capture the political earnestness of my twenties, but it’s also about two working class women who work at the beauty parlour. Recently I’ve come to realise I’m childishly rigid about form. To my mind, fiction is serious business and should be about Serious Subjects and this newsletter is casual, and doesn’t offer the same engagement a novel could. But honestly, I’m learning to rethink that. As a child of the internet, so much of what shapes me and my work today is literally what I learnt from other people’s blogs (shout out to Oil is Opium) and tumblr and being part of a kind of radical community through these public forums. And I’d like to think this newsletter follows in a tradition I owe a lot too, truly, in terms of my political education. And so, coming back to vulnerability, it’s important for me to be vulnerable in writing because well, I believe writing is about more than just the word on the page. Surely, that’s the least of what it’s about.
Usually I have a whole essay to send via this newsletter, and I spend about three days ruminating before I put a whole lot of pressure on myself to bang out a semi cohesive essay in a day and send it off. But honestly, I’m not in a very thesis statement kind of mood these days. It’s the end of the year. It’s winter, and even in Southern California, all I want to do is hibernate. I’m reading a lot, for pleasure and future projects. I read Annie Ernaux’s A Frozen Woman yesterday and it was fantastic. Yesterday was kind of a surreal day, because I was alone for the first time in a long time and didn’t know what to do with myself. I went to the cafe, and started and finished the novel in one sitting. Whenever I manage to do that, I think a lot of the privilege of time I have these days. In the compound that we live in, there is another Pakistani couple. A few weeks ago, the woman and I stood in the park and chatted. It was her son’s birthday, he had called his friends over and they were running around playing football. She is five years older than me, and has four children. She works, her husband is a postdoc. The eldest girl is twelve and the youngest is four. Time, she shook her head at me, I have no time, but Shahmir wanted to have a party and I said beta it’s my only day off but okay we’ll get some cake and pizza. I felt guilty then, watching her supervise the kids and knowing she didn’t have a second to herself on most days. Whereas my time is mostly my own, and often I feel I don’t make good use of it, while also being paralysed by the knowledge that my life will not always be just mine. But then she said to come over one of these days, we’ll have a cup of tea. Something in me changed after that, seeing how a woman with no time was still willing to give me some. I went home that day with a feeling of abundance growing in my chest. Not to make this into some kind of chicken soup for the soul type story actually, of course there are too many restrictions on women’s leisure time. I was just struck by our differing attitudes towards time, and her desire to forgo her time to build community in this strange place we’ve both ended up in for the time being.
Something else she said: People here are very rude, they never speak to me properly.
She wore a floral kurta, a chiffon dupatta slung over one shoulder. I felt a wave of anger when she said that. People are very casual in West Los Angeles. They dress casually, blue jeans or shorts and a t-shirt. Bike shorts, gym tights, no makeup, blonde hair in a messy bun. Plus there’s all that new age co-exist stuff here. People who go to ashtanga yoga everyday and have been to India and buy crystals and, yes, even wear white kurtas themselves sometimes. So anyway it just pissed me off, because despite their pretensions of tolerance they’ll still be rude to a brown woman with four kids who doesn’t wear Lululemon.
When you move to another country, clothes become a thing of paranoia. The clothes we wear mark us out, immediately. Are we from here, or elsewhere? It’s funny how we talk so much of freedom of self expression when we dream of moving abroad (myself included), but really everyone in Southern California just wears a kind of uniform, a tribute to the laid back attitude everyone is dying to convey. It’s funny, now I am realising I never write about my time here, what I experience in the everyday. I feel like years from now I’m going to look back at this and remember that I was here for a few years, at the beach a lot, sort of on a holiday from my real life which I always imagine to be in Pakistan, even if that might not actually be the case. It’s been a transitory kind of time for me, where nothing is really certain. For a long time, I fought it, but now I’m allowing myself to give into it. For years I’ve planned every inch of my life in an effort to push away the thought that I actually have no control over much of it. In the last few weeks of this year, I’m trying to be kinder. To myself, to others around me. In many ways, I feel very lucky to have this time to myself, to read and write and think. In other ways, I’ve come to realise it’s not about having time, and that many people will never get this time, as much as it is about building spaces with each other where time can be different.
If you’ve made it to the end of this admittedly strange newsletter, I hope the last year of the month is one that is peaceful and joyous. If you have exams, good luck! If you have a marathon of weddings to attend, good luck! My mother and sister are coming to visit and I am extremely excited to ring in the new year with them. Happy new year from my side, see you in 2023!
How long are you the America for? Are you going back to Pakistan? What is your experience there?