a brown woman's backbone
on the picking and choosing of western culture, boundaries and agreeableness
There is a version of westernisation that I believe brown households want, and there is a version of it that they don’t.
They want the schools, the salaries, the daughter who speaks well in rooms full of people who didn’t grow up the same way that she did. I think that they want all the proof that the move was worth it. They want to believe that the years of being spoken to slowly at the bank and the GP added up to something. When you’ve crossed a border with your whole life in bags, you’re allowed to expect a receipt.
However, I’ve noticed that the picking and choosing isn’t neutral. When a household decides which bits of the west to keep and which to refuse, the bits that survive are almost always the one that keeps a woman small. The ambition is very welcome however the independence is not. The degree is seen as a trophy right up until it starts producing opinions. You’re allowed to be impressive in a way that reflects well on the family and not in a way that makes you harder to manage at home.
Beneath this cultural argument is an argument about gender, as the contradiction doesn’t land on sons the same way. Brown women get sold on agreeableness as if it were a virtue handed down rather than a leash. It’s important to be soft and accommodating. This role often gets dressed up as respect and you’re supposed to be grateful for the outcome. It’s jarring when you finally see it for what it is, which is a request to take up less room so that everyone else can stay comfortable.
I’ve spent an awful lot of time not understanding why I felt the way that I did. During sixth form I couldn’t live with my parents. The household didn’t work, and a teenager can only absorb so much before something in her starts looking for the door. For years, I’ve carried this low hum of jealousy watching people around me with families that simply functioned, people who could ring home and not brace. I really did believe there was something defective in me for not having that. It took me an embarrassingly long time to consider that the defect might not be located where I’d been told it was.
For me, the turning point wasn’t this slow dawning. But a recent experience, the kind where something just switches off in your brain and you stop performing. The guilt that I had carried for years, about not wanting to keep extending myself towards people who’d never once met me halfway, it just melted. This is not because I had healed but I’d finally registered that I had been disrespected to a degree that no amount of explaining was going to undo. You can’t talk someone into seeing you. It turns out that I had been trying to win an argument that the other side had no interest in having.
That realisation is definitely brutal and there does come a specific type of grief in accepting that the relationship you kept hoping would arrive is not coming. That there is no version of you, no better timing or patience, that was ever going to summon it. It does get easier though as the guilt slowly loses its grip and then all at once, you wake up one day having gone a while without auditing yourself for it.
A clean version of this essay would end on liberation but boundaries can go too far, self-respect can curdle into something else and where you’ve drawn the lines so far out that you’re sitting alone in the middle of them calling it peace. I have watched the appeal of this, to cut everyone who’s ever cost you anything and you’ll certainly be undisturbed but you’ll also be by yourself. There is a kind of self-protection that just is isolation with a better branding.
What my essay is really arguing for is a backbone, not a wall. It’s easy to get these two confused. A backbone will hold you upright in the room and a wall just keeps the room empty. Agreeableness was never the answer, you can’t accommodate your way into respect. The harder discipline is staying a person who can be reached while refusing to be a person who can be walked over.
I’m now on the path of it resolving, which is a less satisfying place to write from than the summit but a more truthful one. I will always catch myself wondering, on the quiet days, whether I’ve protected my peace or just furnished my isolation more comfortably. I won’t have the clean answer but I think a brown woman learning to define herself against everything that wanted her smaller probably isn’t supposed to.
— Ashini
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