[Reader-list] Declaration of (In)Decadance - by Rahel Aima

[cashmeeri]

http://kinaaramagazine.org/index.php/2009/07/rahel-aima/
 
 
Declaration of (In)Decadance
 
Rahel Aima (21) is from Dubai (as much as one really can be from the UAE). She currently lives in NYC where she is  finishing up a BA at Columbia University in anarchist anthropology (”@nthropology”). She can be reached at rahelaima at gmail.com.
 
La Décadence n’a rien à faire avec Amour. La Décadence est un excellent marteau que nous employons pour détruire l’Empire.

[Decadence is not Love. Decadence is a hammer we use to crush Empire.]
- GRANAD(A), http://granadacollective.wordpress.com/
 
America is a series of several displeasures, beamed into our bedrooms in little increments of ketchup packets and adolescent angst. America is the kindly uncle that might violate you with his left hand even as he hands you tamarind sweets from his right. We’re feeling really unclean America, and we’d quite like a shower please, but your oceans are salty and even your rainwater runs cold. Never forget that we love you, America, even when we suspect you have mortgaged our dreams of personhood away.
 
We are brown and glossy and we think we have rather nice legs but our chappals are getting scruffy and that’s not going to land us an I-banking job, is it? Perhaps we should do good and queue up for the NGO-industrial complex to help you help us help them. Soon our governments will build another shopping mall, and we’ll programme ourselves new dreams of getting off your global welfare state. Your cities are expensive, though, and we cant afford your economic noblesse oblige anymore. We’re running out of band-aids already, yet we’re bleeding all over our new shoes. These heels are high! Slow down a bit there, we can’t quite keep up with your shadow. Yet with our orgiastic consumption and your immaculate white goods, we think we could be friends, what do you say?
 
Just as you eat because it is lunchtime, we’re here in your metropolises right on cue because it is your time, America. We’re getting really good at whipping up dal and chana masala in your slow cookers, and promise to floss our teeth and apply Fair and Lovely thrice a day. You can take your picket fences and 2.12 children, and we’ll stick to moving up from dusky to wheaten in the matrimonials section, thanks. Oh, and pick us for your PhD programs! We swear we’re better than the next Global SouthEasterner. Don’t break up with us, America. Your hypermarket floss feels like piano wire and we’re all cut up.
 
How did we find ourselves back here? At home we’re rich yet strangely, uneasily, unsatiated. What’s this gnawing viscous pain? And why are there scars on our lower abdomens? You told us that being organless was really revolutionary, but we don’t feel a smidgen of insurrectionary sentiment, we’ll have you know. We’re trading in your bikes and bandannas for Tata scooters and surgical masks to keep out the smog and SARS. Even our birds don’t like us anymore; they’ve all flown Gulf-ways. We hear there’s good petrodollar money to be made there, do you think we should follow?
 
Broadband penetration is reaching 83% though, will you promise to still respond to our G-chats sometimes? Our scissors are blunt; we can’t quite trace your careful bias cuts anymore. And our hands are sticky with blood, and it won’t peel off satisfyingly like your imported primary school PVA glue used to. Your protectionary bonds are all set to mature soon, please don’t take your money and disappear. Weren’t we supposed to learn our histories before we denied them? How can we still be your simulacra effigies?
 
Our grandparents are all dying alone and our newly atomised families don’t want them anymore. We got nuclear now too; give us your bombers and we’ll share the contents of our tiffins with you. Will you shake hands with us at the club door? Maybe one day we’ll meet again at the corpse of Kashmir. It will be like our subcontinental Casablanca, we’ll get a little misty-eyed. We could have had a beautiful friendship but you wouldn’t listen, would you. We flung your high heels off that bridge that Britain built, and we’re wearing Bata sandals and eating Godrej biscuits now. They come in so many types and flavours, and we keep them cosily stacked in old Danish butter cookies tins, the kind that we used to pass around on birthdays.
 
We brought our chowkidars chai today, and they told us that the real decadence is in good soil, and breathable air, and potable water. We heard that your horticulturalists had managed to coax crackberries into growing on trees; we’re grateful for the mangoes we have. They’ll be getting ripe soon, and we too feel like we’re finally coming of age. We went out in the monsoon rains today, and they were warm.