self is Other

Third culture. To me, the phrase conjures up images of mould growing in Petrie dishes. The third generation of such a mould, perhaps, carefully reared in a sterile laboratory environment. Someone once told me that the phrase third culture referred to children such as myself. Children of twentieth century migrants, children who belonged neither to the culture of their parents, nor the culture of their host land. People like myself who created a new, hybrid third culture, a marriage of the heritage of our parents with the culture of our adopted homeland. But what happens when you have not one adopted homeland but two or three?

I was raised on four continents. I came of age four different times in four different lands. My life began on the Dark Continent, and the sun and the sand of Africa sear through my veins. I was a child and then a teenager in both the warmest and coldest of lands, both literally and emotionally speaking. And now I live in one of the Promised lands, across the oceans, the farthest away from my birthplace.

I find my composite culture to be both a blessing and a curse. My appearance is ethnic-identity-unknown, my facial characteristics and body type only identify me when gazed upon with a knowing eye. I have the luxury of presenting myself as belonging to a number of cultures, some of which I have legitimate claim to, some I don’t.

My portrayals of persona depend on my mood of the day – from demure Arab to flamboyant ghetto princess. From the code of the desert to the law of the streets. African Queen. Buppy (yuppy? guppy?). Nubian princess. Daughter of the desert. StrongBlackWoman. Most days, I scoff at these labels. Other days, I feel trapped in their limitations.

The antonym of self is Other.

i'm in love with a gangsta

When I heard the radio version of Tallahassee Pain’s – what unfortunate initials – song “I’m in Love With a Stripper”, called “I’m in Love With a Dancer”, I had a ‘scuse-me-while-I-kiss-this-guy moment. My mind substituted “dancer” with “gangster”, and I believed it.

At first I was like, is this a tribute to gun-toting, doo-rag wearing, weed-smoking brothers with metal-coated teeth? And I thought about it for a while (through the first verse), and started listening properly right at the chorus. With lyrics like, “she’s poppin' she’s rollin' she’s rollin'”, and "she can pop it she can lock it", I became convinced that in fact T-Pain was performing an ode to female gangsters.

And I loved it. I was over the moon. I thought this was a milestone in terms of the recognition of women who weren’t over-pretty and utterly useless bimbos that seemed to figure in every rapper’s life. I had this mental image of a female gangster (gangstette?), sort of Queen Latifah in Set It Off but straight, coming home after a long day of drive-bys, drug deals, and general gangstering to an r’n’b crooning man who had cooked her dinner.

Before I go any further, I’d like to point out that this delusion lasted until the second time I heard the song a couple of hours later, and I was under the influence of nothing. Unless you consider one Advil two days earlier as mind-altering.

It wasn’t long before I realised that the song was actually a misogynistic recitation of what one particular working girl could do with her attributes. Needless to say, I was very very disappointed.

But I still believe that paying tribute to female gangsters is a way more interesting subject than singing about strippers. Just my opinion.

sometimes you can hear the water

I’ve been thinking about histories for the last little while. Landscape histories, architectural histories, geographical histories. I’d been having conversations over the past week or so that revolved around the physical past. And it was weird, these conversations just seemed to happen, with no prodding on my part, and it was only in retrospect that I noticed the common thread.

Sometime last week, I was sitting on the stoop in front of my apartment building late at night, when an elderly couple walked past. The gentleman had lived in my neighbourhood for fifty years, and he talked about how the street I lived on used to be a river when he first moved here.

“Some time, late at night,” he said. “Two three in the morning, when it’s quiet, you can hear the water.”

And after a bit of cane-waving, the gentleman and his wife shuffled off.

I could wax poetic about how in order to experience nature in a city we’d have to wait until the traffic died down, and then kneel down in the middle of the street, ear pressed to the asphalt, and hope that the sounds of rushing water weren’t coming from the sewers. But I’ll save that for another day.

Another conversation I had was with a friend of mine who had spent most of his life in farmland. He had grown up in a house that was built in the early twentieth century, and told me about a visit an older lady had made to his home. She’d grown up in the house, and had invited herself in to take a look around her childhood home. The elderly lady came back a while later, grandchildren in tow, with a photograph of the house as she had remembered it.

And then I bought a magazine called Dwell that examined modern residential architecture. I fell in love with a transformation of a shophouse in Singapore into an über-modern residence. I fell in love with the idea that you would never have guessed that behind an ancient and almost decaying façade was a restored/redesigned/refashioned interior. That has got to be my favourite residential transformation to date.

I live in a city where copycat housing is everywhere – entire neighbourhoods look disarmingly identical. To me, that’s purgatory. If I had to live in a neighbourhood that looked like that, lunch would include antidepressants. It would drive me out of my mind. I can feel myself slowly going crazy (crazy going slowly) at the mental image of myself trapped in the middle of a block where the only thing that would set my house apart would be the shape of the doorknocker.

it's about time

I've been resisting writing a blog for a few years. In the beginning, I believe it was because I was intimidated by the idea of posting my writing for all to see and judge. Then I started writing for money, and learned how to disassociate from my writing (both a good and a bad thing). Once I got over that hurdle, I started creating excuses for not starting a blog - do I have enough time (I never have enough time); really, who would want to read what I write (who cares - isn't keeping a blog supposed to be cathartic anyway?); am I really arrogant enough to believe that there is a place in the public sphere for my writing (considering the democratization of communication courtesy of the Internet, it's not arrogant at all); and most recently - and probably the excuse that carries the most truth - can I commit to posting regularly (yup, commitment issues galore)?

So I decided to satisfy my ego, express my emotions (you poor sods), exercise my democratic rights, and test my ability to commit. But having resisted for so long, I needed to devise an excuse for blogging. I wanted a creative outlet. So here it is: this is where I'll chat pure lyric.