left to make up her own mind.
Maybe Amita really was harmless.
In the summer of 2014, Amita asked Prabir if he’d come to a rally, organised in response to a recent spate of racially motivated
bashings, at which she’d been invited to speak. Prabir said yes, happily surprised to learn that Amita wasn’t as detached
from reality as he’d imagined, locked away in the university battling colonialism with
Nostromo
comics and undermining the patriarchy by pointlessly flipping computer bits. At last, here she was doing something of which
he could be unequivocally proud.
The rally took place on a Sunday; they marched through the streets beneath a cloudless sky. Prabir liked summer in Toronto;
the sun only climbed two-thirds of the way to the zenith, but it made the trip last. Keith seemed to think that thirty-two
degrees was sweltering; when they reached the park and sat down on the grass, he opened the picnic hamper they’d brought and
consumed several cans of beer.
In front of two thousand people, Amita took her place at the lectern. Prabir pointed her out to Madhusree. ‘Look! There’s
Amita! She’s famous!’
Amita began, ‘We’re gathered here today to deplore and denounce racism, and that’s all well and good, but I believe the time
is long overdue for a more sophisticated analysis of this phenomenon to reach the public sphere. My research has shown that
antipathy towards people of other cultures is in fact nothing but a
redirection
of a far more basic form of oppression. A careful study of the language used in Germany in the 1930s to describe the Jews
reveals something quite striking, and yet, to me, deeply unsurprising: every term of racial abuse that was employed was also
a form of
feminisation
. To be weak, to be shiftless, to be untrustworthy – to be
the Other
at all, under patriarchy – what else can this possibly mean, but to be
female?’
If the Nazis had triumphed, Amita explained, they would eventually have run out of distracting false targets, and started
feeding their true enemy – German women – into the gas chambers. ‘Forget all those Riefenstahl Rhine maidens; the real core
of Nazi propaganda films was always a celebration of
male
strength,
male
beauty. In the Thousand-Year Reich, women would have been retained only for breeding, and only for as long as it took to
supplant them with a technological alternative. Once their last essential role was gone, they too would have vanished into
the ovens.
‘I was invited here to address you today because of the colour of my skin, and the country of my birth, and it’s true that
these things make me a target. But we all know that there’s more violence directed against Canadian
women
than there is against every ethnic minority combined. So I stand here before you and say:
as a woman
I too was in Belsen,
as a woman
I too was in Dachau,
as a woman
I too was in Auschwitz!’
Prabir waited anxiously for a riot to start, or at least for someone to shout her down. Surely there were children or grandchildren
of Holocaust survivors in the crowd? And even if there weren’t, there had to be someone with the courage to cry ‘Thief!’
But the crowd applauded. People stood up and cheered.
Amita rejoined them on the grass, lifting Madhusree into her arms. Prabir watched her with a curious sense of detachment,
wondering if he finally understood why she’d agreed to shelter them. She’d made it clear what her idea of compassion was:
to denounce violence, and to show real generosity towards its victims, but then to cash it all in for a cry of ‘Me, too!’
like an infant competing for sympathy. That was what the death of six million strangers meant to her: not a matter of grief,
or horror, but of envy.
She smiled down at him, jiggling Madhusree. ‘What did you think, Prabir?’
‘Will you show me your tattoo?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your number from the camp.’
Amita’s smile vanished. ‘That’s a
Maybe Amita really was harmless.
In the summer of 2014, Amita asked Prabir if he’d come to a rally, organised in response to a recent spate of racially motivated
bashings, at which she’d been invited to speak. Prabir said yes, happily surprised to learn that Amita wasn’t as detached
from reality as he’d imagined, locked away in the university battling colonialism with
Nostromo
comics and undermining the patriarchy by pointlessly flipping computer bits. At last, here she was doing something of which
he could be unequivocally proud.
The rally took place on a Sunday; they marched through the streets beneath a cloudless sky. Prabir liked summer in Toronto;
the sun only climbed two-thirds of the way to the zenith, but it made the trip last. Keith seemed to think that thirty-two
degrees was sweltering; when they reached the park and sat down on the grass, he opened the picnic hamper they’d brought and
consumed several cans of beer.
In front of two thousand people, Amita took her place at the lectern. Prabir pointed her out to Madhusree. ‘Look! There’s
Amita! She’s famous!’
Amita began, ‘We’re gathered here today to deplore and denounce racism, and that’s all well and good, but I believe the time
is long overdue for a more sophisticated analysis of this phenomenon to reach the public sphere. My research has shown that
antipathy towards people of other cultures is in fact nothing but a
redirection
of a far more basic form of oppression. A careful study of the language used in Germany in the 1930s to describe the Jews
reveals something quite striking, and yet, to me, deeply unsurprising: every term of racial abuse that was employed was also
a form of
feminisation
. To be weak, to be shiftless, to be untrustworthy – to be
the Other
at all, under patriarchy – what else can this possibly mean, but to be
female?’
If the Nazis had triumphed, Amita explained, they would eventually have run out of distracting false targets, and started
feeding their true enemy – German women – into the gas chambers. ‘Forget all those Riefenstahl Rhine maidens; the real core
of Nazi propaganda films was always a celebration of
male
strength,
male
beauty. In the Thousand-Year Reich, women would have been retained only for breeding, and only for as long as it took to
supplant them with a technological alternative. Once their last essential role was gone, they too would have vanished into
the ovens.
‘I was invited here to address you today because of the colour of my skin, and the country of my birth, and it’s true that
these things make me a target. But we all know that there’s more violence directed against Canadian
women
than there is against every ethnic minority combined. So I stand here before you and say:
as a woman
I too was in Belsen,
as a woman
I too was in Dachau,
as a woman
I too was in Auschwitz!’
Prabir waited anxiously for a riot to start, or at least for someone to shout her down. Surely there were children or grandchildren
of Holocaust survivors in the crowd? And even if there weren’t, there had to be someone with the courage to cry ‘Thief!’
But the crowd applauded. People stood up and cheered.
Amita rejoined them on the grass, lifting Madhusree into her arms. Prabir watched her with a curious sense of detachment,
wondering if he finally understood why she’d agreed to shelter them. She’d made it clear what her idea of compassion was:
to denounce violence, and to show real generosity towards its victims, but then to cash it all in for a cry of ‘Me, too!’
like an infant competing for sympathy. That was what the death of six million strangers meant to her: not a matter of grief,
or horror, but of envy.
She smiled down at him, jiggling Madhusree. ‘What did you think, Prabir?’
‘Will you show me your tattoo?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your number from the camp.’
Amita’s smile vanished. ‘That’s a
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