Dates, Lentils, Psyllium Husk Part 2

It’s deeper than cringe- that is how regular-degular ethnic groceries are crammed into the sensationalised 9-ways-mentos-and-coke-will-improve-your-sex-life economy of clickbait health. I sometimes feel the echo of colonial science and how that shapes how I see myself whenever capitalism plugs into brown and Black physiology. It’s an ulcer oft forgotten which smarts reliably when touched. I hate it here, in the shadow of the Eugenics bros at UCL who laid the ideological foundations of Nazism and death camps and who continue to inform the profiling technologies of today.

Around Ramadan there was a viral video doing the rounds from Dr. Mubin Syed claiming that the centuries of colonial-manufactured famine in the Indian subcontinent has had an impact on how people of South Asian descent are ‘starvation adapted’, in other words, put on fat fast and put on lean weight slow. It begged the question, compared to who?

It let off a funk of anger, disgust, relief and denial on my emotional palate. Granted its icky that colonialism has tampered with my body, but I was taken aback by the problematic relief I felt at having a scientific, historical rationale as to why my body may not fit Eurocentric beauty standards. If ethnic food discourse makes us feel better about our place in violent supply chains (see part 1), the vibe I got from Dr. Syed’s research was pushing something similar in studying the South Asian body to reclaim a racial type and feel better in the face of Western body ideals- a losing game if you ask me.

It feels so much like callipers and reticulated phrenology dummies that my instinct is to disengage and discredit. As someone with a body like a Salman Toor painting, I squirm when confronted by what fatness means being socialised in a deeply fatphobic society as a lean body- how it remains such an accepted prejudice. I’m endlessly flashed the blade by the cutting remarks from hench cousins lifting to complete the other half of their deen, by snide aunties; it’s Crayola-ed into the more sinister conversations of my little cuzzies. If I’ve been so immersed in it, why wouldn’t I be a vector for fatphobia? For that reason, I can’t drop the weird feelings, need to delve inside, speak up and do the homework. My heart mimes Donna Haraway, says stay with the trouble.

With all this on my mind, I was doing my thing looking for smut in the bookshop one evening and read an interview by Prem Sahib for BUTT magazine Issue 30 where Sunil Gupta called the Indian body “shapeless”  in defiance to the “terrible mafia of hairless gym bodies” spawned from the stigma of the AIDS crisis. Granted it’s ideological as hell to suggest an Indian body exists (here for the de-centring of Indian narratives in South Asian diaspora), I felt seen in that I desire a body that doesn’t need to be anything, a fluid out of container, a brown froggy thing.

It’s no new idea, as trans writers like Paul B. Preciado and Alok V. Menon been doing that work and gave me the language to yearn for formlessness some years ago- they taught me how flimsy gender norms are and how it’s everyone’s business to whack the piñata of tradition and bask in the teeming confetti of  solutions to the millionfold ways we are made drab, miserable, spiritless and not our own. How simping for the binary is licking the boots of the colonial project that massacred Two-Spirit diviners and Hijras; how moral panic is a staple for governments with blood on their hands and voter bases with goldfish memories. Back to the bookshop, it was nonetheless one of many small nudges in my miniscule trajectory. I asked myself why Gupta’s words went ring-a-ding and if it’s really as simple as being tired of having my arm twisted into a market audience. I want them to stop selling me things, yes, am always fumbling around to turn the Adblock on in this thing- but maybe it’s more.

Maybe it was a nascent flicker of transness. To be clear, I don’t identify as trans nor cis- I know I’m not a capital-M man and yet I present as masc, am in touch with the strands of my masculinity tossed in the salad of my femininity and the squiggly things that defy definition. I’m privileged in that I can round my gender to the nearest decimal and pass when I feel unsafe which gets more painful each time I do it but it still lands me in cisville. Wording it all is a blindfolded unicycle archery show at the moment, and that’s with the flaming hoops of understanding gender as something one does, the distinction between gender identity and presentation, the slacklines of passing, privilege and danger.

I’m pissed at the way a cis-privileging system demands an ideal trans subject to pass for hormones, state support, basic humanity and at the same time find that trans discourse can be ironically binary in places where it reckons with demigendered in-betweens. I pored over papers shredding the objectivity of the Western medical gender binary, on travestis crafting their bodies and families in Brazil on lesbian and transmasc masculinities in South Africa during my anthropology degree, felt a tug I didn’t feel with the other modules as these understandings were rewriting how I understood my personhood. My ears pricked up when I read about how South Asian Bhakti and Sufi poets and saints spoke to Allah using transgendered voices.

It was some years later when I stumbled on a rando Youtube PSBT India documentary on Kothis in Calcutta where I found a narrative that really spoke to me. I watched them talk in English and Bangla about what being Kothi meant to them and resonated with the nuance and how there was no consensus on what being gender non-conforming felt like or how they related to the masculinity society expected of them. I read this into the shapelessness Gupta spoke about. I especially rated how all this wasn’t welded into the iron maiden of Euro-American-Gender-Theory jargon, like not a single convoluted Judith Butler quote in sight. I’m reading Grace Lavery’s memoir at the moment and while it’s a killer read, by God does it smack of how gender nonconformity and transness is gatekept by a caste of white affluent academics in the UK context. In the words Rikh, one of the activists interviewed, “you may have seen me somewhere, I should say us, you have seen us, we are everywhere, in your families, among your neighbours… we are not aliens, we live with you, our worlds are the same.” Cue the anthem.

I’ve also been reading the NOMA Guide to Fermentation which changed my mind about how I thought about temperature in a similar way to how my mind was changed about inhabiting gender. Temperature or gender isn’t a passive state one finds oneself in, they aren’t stable adjectives. The guide says “Temperature is an average of the kinetic energy of countless molecules moving at different speeds,” and with regards to making black garlic, “…in a clove of garlic held at 60ºC/140ºF, 99.9999 percent of the molecules might very well be moving too slowly to inspire a pyrolytic or Maillard reaction. But occasionally, one molecule out of a billion might be moving fast enough to spark one of these energetic chemical reactions. From there, these isolated, sparse reactions cascade”(René Redzepi and David Zilber, Artisan 2018: 406).

There’s something in that, about containing multitudes, about the impossible task of stasis, the imperative of transition. It made me think of the ways labels are created for the sake of aligning demands to advocate politically. It made me think of what Alok Vaid Menon is talking about when they appeal to allies of the various gender rights movements to take the plunge when they draw the line at considering their own sense of self- to honour those glints of dissonance.

But how ironic to circle back to black garlic for this metaphor which some may consider a White foodstuff given its availability in wholefoods and the profligate use of a rice cooker to make it at home. All of this, Alok’s, Dr. Syed’s, Zarina Muhammad’s, Sunil Gupta’s, Mel’s and Halima’s words are little sparks, microscopic shooting stars which mark the way I understand being in a body- like black garlic, perhaps these glimmering shifts are me ripening into something delicious, offensive, unprecedented.