Brown Intimacy Pt. 2: The Other

I found a New York Times article this morning called Love and Marriage, South Asian American Style. Written by an Indian man raised in the depths of Ohio, the article describes what contemporary arranged marriages look like for many “South Asian” Americans using specific channels to find a partner. It was a familiar read, mainly because a variety of my friends and cousins have found their partners through the same channels – partners to build lives with, much like any other culture. These were all things that I had grown up knowing and understanding with a certain level of intricacy, which is what made reading the article a slightly uncomfortable experience. You could tell that the writer had written this article with a white audience in mind – a natural compulsion for a man born and raised in Ohio I’m sure – but it was the first time I had read someone describing practices that I am so intimately familiar with in such a foreign way. As if some extraterrestrial being floated onto Earth to document the mothers of two Pakistanis in their mid 20s exchange bio data over a meal. How odd, must be a cultural anomaly. 

The article did make me think, though likely not in a manner intended by the diluted depictions of brown love that our author spun up for white digestibility’s sake. It made me think about the way our love and relationships are represented – how we represent them to ourselves, and how we represent them to others. Sometimes these two representations coincide, and sometimes they’re spread across the physical and cultural distance between South Asia and North America. Because love can be influenced by personal attributes – ethnic background and culture, family relationships, upbringing. But it is also influenced by the direct and immediate environment – by watching and listening to others experience it in day-to-day life. Conceptions of love when raised in the United States, often look different than conceptions of love when raised in a drastically different culture. Of course, globalization and travel introduce a significant amount of overlap, but I’ve always found it interesting how white love has such a pervasive quality. How with other conceptions of white superiority, white love takes its place as the ultimate form of bliss.  

I read about a new e-publishing venture that aims to publish books which “provide romance for the South Asian soul.” This venture functions under the notion that our souls are devoid of representation, are starved for love and for the ability to connect to love in fiction. It is true to an extent – books about brown bodies in love are far fewer in number than our white counterparts. But I wonder how much of that is because we’re looking for brown bodies within a specific type of love, and not the love most suited to our brown bodies. How many of us are looking for a Nicholas Sparks-esque romantic drama where we have Ali and Ayesha falling into a deeply passionate and obsessively sexual love that melts away their individuality. A love that is reckless, where pragmatism has no bearing and where the lack of pragmatism is somehow acceptable to wider society. A love that is uncontrollable, one that begs for a lack of discipline, that conquers all it comes in contact with. Are our souls starved by the lack of representation in general, or the lack of representation in ideal tales of white love? 

Seeing myself in a novel like this would feel as uncomfortable to me as reading a NYT article about South Asian love genetically tailored for the white man. The conception of love I was bred with always took on a very different representation. The love I learned stems from pragmatism, represented by both good intentions and rational choices. It is not blinding, or all-encompassing, and it definitely does not conquer the questionable parts of human character. It is a small fraction of the ocean of emotions felt towards an individual at a particular point in time. Love does not change people, nor do people change for love – on its own it is negligible if not paired with qualities like respect, curiosity, discipline, qualities that shape the strength of a relationship. I learned that opening the mind, heart, body, and soul so wholly to another carries weight only when it is consistent and permanent. It is a feeling best grown over time, bound by contract before emotion. 

I may not have learned love from white poets and screenplays, but I learned from papers on Islamic mysticism that taught me how love is not a rarity only found within another. I learned from Quranic passages that speak of how soulmates are not two halves of a whole but rather two wholes in unison. I learned from Shia history that recalls moments of humility and mutual sacrifice. And I learned from people in my life who showed me that flaws in character exist with or without love, that love does not make certain flaws worth the experience. 

I cannot control what type of love feels natural to me, and I cannot control how my version of love is represented and interpreted by those I interact with. But I can control how critically I think about why certain forms of love are considered “ideal” over others. I can control which influences inject themselves into my conceptions. And I can accept that authentic love looks different for us all – for those of us raised here, there, or a bit of everywhere.