Minal Hajratwala at Swabhava

photo credit Bob Hsiang

Minal Hajratwala is in Bangalore for a few weeks – we mostly know her as the editor for Queer Ink‘s forthcoming 2012 Queer Ink Anthology (also here). I cannot currently remember who took dreadful advantage of whom, but Vinay (the guy who runs-manages-GrandViziersSwabhava/Good As You ) spread the word and a bunch of us gathered to meet her today (actually, by the time this gets posted, yesterday) at the Swabhava office.

Hajratwala’s Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages To Five Continents explores her family’s

Excerpts from *Leaving India*

multigenerational movement across the world, contextualising her self against this century of transplantation and settlement. It’s won at least four awards (one of them a Lammy!). Hajratwala is currently in India for research for her next novel and for her poetry – more on those later.

It rained quite spitefully on the latecomers today, but we began (mostly) on time. Hajratwala read out an excerpt from Leaving India, a section pertaining to herself and her early adulthood – Feminism, Queerness (“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism the practice.”) and the like. She’s not my favourite sort of reader – her tone remains too even – but she has a clear and soft voice. All in all, very pleasant.

Questions! Answers! :

• Hajratwala spent eight years (instead of the projected two) researching and writing this book. Her extended, very close-knit family is spread out over nine countries. She has thirty-five first cousins, and knows all their names – an impressive feat in and of itself. The book, in some senses, is her way of understanding the sheer scale of diaspora and finding a place for herself within it.
• Writing the novel changed her; it rebuilt her relationships with the family, allowed her time, conversation, communication with an older generation that would not necessarily spend time taking a young woman and her questions seriously. Diasporic narratives and histories have to encompass an extraordinary amount of movement: “It is the central trauma of our lives.” In some ways, it is the role of the queer family member, to have that displacement away and reconciliation back to the traditional family home – it gives the writer a dual, insider/outsider perspective.
• The section in Leaving India which is about herself was written first, and partly as a response to the “naked honesty” she was getting from the people she talked to. She came out to her extended family on a case by case basis, and for the most part all is well. (She did remind us that it’s easier to be proud of a “famous lesbian” in the family rather than a boring old “regular lesbian”.)
• Blogs! She likes blogs. (Who doesn’t?) They give you a personal space to write anything you choose, without an editor overseeing the process. You can control who sees your words and who doesn’t. It can be a space to have your private, intimate voice “connect to some bigger thing out there”. (She had contact with the damascusgaygirl hoaxer: See this and this.)
• The Queer Ink Anthology! Queer Ink is going to be one of the first queer publishing houses in South Asia, and this anthology is going to give us stories that haven’t been heard before. About ten percent of the submissions were in vernacular languages. (Queer Ink is looking for people interested in editing, design, writing, the like. Contact them! Say you want in!)

After, there were cookies. After after, we went to Koshy’s. Life was good.

(originally posted at my reading blog)

WHaQ! meeting, June 5th 2011

This was a meeting we'd been waiting for for ages and ages and ages. Diana had showed us the trailer for Deliver Me back in December, so we've been waiting to see the real thing like hungry hippos for six whole months.

Deliver Me is a great first effort, thematically coherent, and thought-provoking in unexpected ways. I'm not going to spoil the movie for those of us who haven't seen it, but I think that even if you don't agree with the movie's central conceit the characters and their principles are going to stay with you well after the end.

There were one or two new faces on Sunday, and Diana had brought some of her cast and the cinematographer along, so there was some discussion about technicalities - and a lot of discussion of the difficulties of making the movie on a limited budget as a non-professional crew.

This took up nearly two hours, after which we mostly broke up to head for FOOD and DRINKS -

- but not before we made a fairly important socialisation change. WHaQ! members have been meeting fairly regularly in Tavern on Wednesday nights, but lately - for many, many reasons, some of us have been thinking that it's not a nice a place as it used to be. SO we're shifting venues. Those of us who want to just hang out, chill, and talk outside of the formalities of the meetings are invited to our new Thursday hang out - if you weren't at the meeting, and aren't on the mailing lists, send an email to whaqbangalore@gmail.com to ask for details. The new place sounds awesome. (This also means that anyone who goes to the Good As You meetings on Thursdays can head straight from Swabhava to drinks with the rest of the gals instead of heading home or going to Koshys - which is a nice place, don't get me wrong, but it's excellent to have so many things to do!)

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Gurl in the World has already blogged this, but please, take a look, pass it on: help a mother reunite with her children, who've been kept hostage from her for the past year.

Good As You meeting on 14th April 2011

(Sometime I need to blog about BQFF, which happened way back in February. I will! I promise. Sunday?)

A quick run through of the meeting, which to me seemed sort of slow and tedious (sorry, other people who were there, I love you, but I was not feeling it that Thursday):

• Three new people showed up! Three!
• Two of them were women! Excuse me while I drool both as a dirty-minded woman and as someone who likes representation.
• There were some old faces too, not naming any names. Hi!
• Gaysi is looking for contributors! If you feel like you should be writing for that cool and lovely website, sharing your story or contributing in any other way, go here.
• Jindal Law School was conducting an "empirical survey" of the LGBT community in Delhi, to collect data and file a petition in front of the Supreme Court "this Friday", which at the time of the article's posting would be the 15th of April, yesterday. Basically, the petition was to say that the High Court judgement in the Naz case has positively affected the lives of LGBT(IQ) people, and shouldn't we keep the things that make our lives better? I found this bewildering. Did they contact Gaysi too late? Were they canvassing the entire time and added Gaysi in as an afterthought? I'd forgotten that the target demographic was Delhi-based, and so was even more bewildered. Anyway, that way yesterday. I hope it worked for them.
• R told me about this article: "As Good As It Can Get" by Vinay Chandran, it appeared in The Hindu on the 13th. It's about Bangalore as an LGBTIQ-friendly city, and not-so-friendly.

A. walked in about halfway through, bringing in some energy and Things To Do - he had the men filling out one of those old fashioned Adjustment inventories on behalf of some student in Calcutta, who is basically out to prove that people are people despite their sexuality. (But s/he only wanted men, which I find annoying and baffling and reprehensible, even.) Filling out the forms took a while, and figuring out what "Diphtheria" is took almost as long. (For future reference, it's some thing that includes diarrhoea, and that's all we knew about it.) [For accurate future reference, it's a respiratory illness.]

At some point, we all went to Koshy's. Yum!

Good As You meeting on 7th April 2011

So Vinay and I were talking about yesterday's meeting - I was awake in the morning, which is a minor miracle - and he mentioned that two Slovenian writers were going to be there. I tend to keep my Thursday evenings booked for GAY meetings, and this time I sent you lazy lot (so many maybes, and only one actual show!) emails and texts and Facebook harassings to let you know that good stuff was happening.

Anyway. I got there a little early and so had time to red little samples of the writers' work - Vinay had pamphlets of Contemporary Slovenian Writers (for prose and poetry separately) lying around - I didn't read through much of the poetry, but I did devour the prose - names I now aim to keep track of include Maja Novak and Andrej Blatnik.

Suzana Tratnik was in there too, with two short stories titled "Animal Kingdom" and "Reckless Boy". Suzana Tratnik is our first Slovenian writer/translator/activist - if I remember right she has three novels published. She founded (co-founded? can't remember) one of the earliest activist social groups in Slovenia, back in the 80s or so. She's currently not officially a member of any groups, and organises the Slovenian queer film festival with Brane Mozetic and others. I liked her stories - in translation they had a spare, lucid style. Minimal, intense, framing the subject matter for view without banging on about it blatantly. Reminded me a bit of Raymond Carver.

Brane Mozetic was our poet - I leafed through Banalities, his latest collection, but couldn't really focus since I was also trying to pay attention to the conversation around me. His (translated) verse seemed, from my brief reading, to be fluid, even tender. I need to read/hear him again before I can be sure, though. Mozetic is one of the organisers of the Slovenian queer film festival and is the editor of a small press, whose name I never asked for because I am an idiot. Like Tratnik, Mozetic was an early member of activist groups in Slovenia and I do not currently remember if he is still actively a member of any of them.

(Obviously they're both active, just not... members.)

The meeting was a bit of give and take - Tratnik and Mozetic asked about our general out-ness and our lives, we asked about the Slovenian queer scene - Slovenia is bloody tiny! It is weird and wonderful both. (There was this hilarious moment when we had to admit that we weren't sure where precisely Slovenia was, which means I have to be nice to Americans from now on for evermore.)

A WHaQ member from We're Here and Beer - yeah, that one, we love you, A! had asked me to write on this blog about the Moderate Lesbian. As opposed to the extreme over the top lesbian we here about. I asked about this extreme lesbian, the stereotypical Indian lesbian, in the meeting, and over a discussion that ranged from porn to What-Is-The-Stereotypical-Indian-Lesbian, we established that there doesn't seem to be a desi stereotype, that there isn't an established "Authentic Indian Lesbian", that since we are people we cannot be authentic artifacts anyway, and many other things which I shall discuss in a longer post. I'm linking this over the WHaQ email, by the way. One of the nice things, I do want to note right here, about not having a pre-established desi stereotype is that it leaves us free to be as true to our various lesbian, bisexual, unlabelled, transgender, asexual selves as we choose. We're free, or at least we could be.

S. was there, and WHaQ members might remember her current funding efforts for two partners fallen on bad times - the Good As You collection for the meeting was made over to her as a collective contribution.

Then most of us went to Koshy's. I haven't mentioned this before, but one of our new members attended the meeting, and she came to Koshy's too; it was a nice chance for me to get to know her better. I'm glad you were there, B!

Today, at 6:30, Tratnik and Mozetic are reading from their latest work at 1 Shanthi road, and I am now signing off since I want to get there on time.

{Edited to add: I've placed the post on my personal blog, mostly because the reading was not ncessarily a queer-themed one. The readings were excellent, though, so if you don't mine my pimping myself out here: The Reading.}

And again: those of us who feel comfortable going to a new group, to meet strangers, should try Good As You meetings. Good As You is a safe zone like WHaQ, and I think there are loads of us who would like the atmosphere. Think about it?