Heart | existabovethenoise

Delhi is a city of extremes and contradictions. For me, the issue of giving to the poor, perhaps, is a combination of the two. I have found the begging children, elderly, and disabled to have generated – in me – emotions that are in extreme contradiction to my nature. I admit that I am repulsed, not by the poor, but by the business of being poor. It’s one thing to see “Slumdog Millionaire” and to sigh at how sad those people over there are living. It’s an altogether different thing to see those people every day. Every single day, with their hands outstretched in the same conditions – after you gave them food, after you have seen others give them money. Every single day, those people are on the same street corner, sometimes holding different drugged and drowsy babies each day.

It’s a pathetic scene. It’s sad to hear that most of these people are part of a racket. A racket that pays them a minimal salary of chapati and a few rupees so that they won’t dare starve, but survive to beg another day. The money those of us passersbys fork over goes, instead, to gangs who collude with police to ‘own’ street corners like drug dealers in inner city America. It’s hard to see the value of giving, when there’s such a senseless market of taking.

I can say that I have been deeply affected by this situation. For all the community service I’ve done in my life time, the food banks I’ve donated to, the Salvation Armies I’ve frequented, I have been very reluctant to engage India’s poor. For, while this poverty seems so abject, it also seems so self-induced. While it seems so self-induced, it also seems so inexplicably, dramatically exaggerated in the direction of downtrodden. It is not poverty that causes children to beg in the streets for a pittance, when government schools are free. It is not poverty that causes women to re-open gash marks on their bodies to produce more gore with which to guilt givers. The poverty itself is not pretend, but these theatrical advances are all too frequent and all too irresponsible on the part of the actor. The whole scene has turned me off.

Delhi has left me with a bitter and miserly taste. I find myself despising street children, because I know it’s just a matter of time before they come begging and whining incessantly for something I will never give – money. They’ll touch you. They’ll poke you. They’ll touch your feet as a sign of respect and also as a nuisance – hoping that you’ll be so annoyed that you’ll give them money to go away. And, I must admit, I do want them to go away. Not because I don’t want their poverty in my face, but simply because I know there’s nothing I can do to help them. Their extremes can’t be helped by money, and this sick theatre won’t be abolished by my guilt. Yet, as I am gearing up to leave a city that has – despite all my complaints – allowed me to make significant progress personally and professionally, I have decided that I will learn to trust.

Finding a charity that one can trust in Delhi is like differentiating melted chocolate from fresh cow dung – not using your sense of smell. It’s a dirty and involved business. It requires research and personal investment. Or else the consequences are grave. Word has it that there are over 3 million non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India, hundreds of thousands of which are New Delhi based. Corruption is commonplace and an ever-present crime of opportunity. Yet, in my quest to accomplish #24 of my 30 before 30, I found 3 charities that I’m willing to support.

While at a work organized volunteer day I finally got a chance to engage with the children of Salaam Balaak Trust. I’d heard for years that these street children gave city tours (dare I say, slum tours), but I never could actually find time in my schedule to go on one. Over an art project with children of all ages, I came to find out that the organization takes in children who are found in and around Delhi’s train station. Many are runaways who left abuse, prostitution, and/or child labor in their local villages and towns. Also, they work to serve children who are not orphaned, but whose parents are otherwise slum residents or homeless. So, this art project outing rekindled my interest in the organization and has compelled me to again revisit the sore subject of street children.

While browsing the web for some academic research I was working on, I came across Deepalaya – a non-religious, NGO focused on eradicating urban and rural poverty. With options to sponsor a child or support specific projects of health, sheltering, or girls’ education, it seems this almost thirty year old organization is doing good work. My contact with this organization is new and, for lack of time, mainly financial. Yet, I suspect it will be sustained. As the communication between the organization and sponsors is really detailed and steady – understand that this is not usually the case with other organizations I’ve been in touch with – I can believe that I will continue to build confidence in the organization and a relationship with the child I sponsor.

Kamalini came to me in the mail. I received an ad about a women’s vocational school that was not only accepting volunteers, but also in-kind donations of any kind. I had long grown tired of donating my old clothes to the same organization and wanted to build a relationship with a new organization. I found the organizers at Kamalini to be a dedicated and concentrated group of both foreign and Indian women working together to provide vocational skills to women in urban villages in and around Delhi. While some chose to use these educational opportunities to get better at their professions, others were just starting out and seeking the financial independence needed for traditional Indian women to make tough personal choices. Kamalini has teamed up with a local tour guide to give a guided tour of the Shahpur Jat Village neighborhood and then a tour of the Kamalini facility. See below photos of my tour, which has effectively changed my relationship with this city and my feelings about philanthropy.

We are not all immigrants. I learned this the hard way in seventh grade when all 30 of us were asked to create a poster about our ancestry, naming the first person in our families who came to America. I thought, “Trick question! Right?…right?” Wrong! Somehow, every student other than me actually had an immigrant story to tell. E-ver-y other student! Even the Black ones (And there were only three of us in the bunch). Can you believe it? It was Ellis and Angel Island all up and through that classroom. I was shocked.

I was shocked that I could come up with photos going back at least six maternal generations of my family being in America. (And I was also shocked that I had no White ancestors in the mix on that side of the family) I asked about the family before those six generations and they all were still American though there were no surviving photos. These were people who survived the Jim Crow South, who survived the Great Migration, who survived the Newark riots. These people were my people and these people, my people, were and still are American. But, they/we are not immigrants.

So, my seventh grade assignment earned me short shrift. My poster board, I, my family, my family’s American story wasn’t that interesting. We just didn’t have that ‘immigrant’ swag. I had pictures, and I had actually met each and every one of those people in my pictures. In comparison to my classmates’ two generations of photos and heart wrenching anecdotes of someone’s relative’s ancestral remembrances, my family’s story was so complete and so full.

Even today, I remember despising going to my great, great grandmother’s nursing home because “it smells like old people.” Yes, I actually said those words and I remember saying them. Which is not to suggest that I was just a jackass 8-year-old, but it is to prove that my family was not, at the time, based in historical fiction. They were then, and remain today to be people who I know. I mean, know know. These photographs dating back to the early 1900s, of people who were born in the late 1800s, were of people of my present. I, in seventh grade, could discuss their flaws and features. Yet, somehow, I forgot to say… sorry, we’re not immigrants.

As I have grown more academically invested in languages, foreign cultures, Diasporas and dispersal, I realize fully how foundational that experience was in shaping my trajectory. I wonder if somehow I’ve been trying to overcompensate for the lack of global exposure in my ancestry by offering global exposure in my lifetime. I wonder if I felt compelled to show the world that the terms ‘Black’ and ‘African American’ are not always synonymous. (It’s like people say, ‘Every Sikh is a Singh, but not every Singh is a Sikh’ – or is it the other way around?) I wonder if I internalized a sense of shame about not having an immigrant story, so much so that I wanted to create my own. Maybe I grew a curiosity, intellectually asking myself “What’s so fascinating about immigrants anyway?” These are all possibilities of the inner workings of my subconscious mind.

I can’t identify what pushed this African-American girl to wander the world, but I’ll tell you one thing I’ve never actually looked for in my travels: a sense of belonging. I’ve never seen people from a foreign land and thought, “maybe they are my long-lost cousins.” Nope, all of my cousins are in New Jersey, Texas, Georgia and South Carolina. Done.

I don’t go to West Africa hoping that they embrace me as if I were their own. I don’t read stories of ancient Ethiopian and Egyptian civilizations and use their accomplishments to bolster my self-worth today. I am proud of these people’s accomplishments because they are worthy of glory and awe, just as ancient Rome and Greece, just as Nubia and Benin. But, they do not inform my life, as in my own life story.

Mine is of African-Americans in the most classic sense of the term. And in every sense of pride I can muster, I am proud of their story (as my story) and I can only own their story (as my story) alone. I am proud of Africans brought to America in a condition of slavery. I am proud of what they’ve made of families broken, and how they formed adopted families out of necessity and conditioning. I am proud that their fictional homelands did not outlive their ability to cope with present realities – despite how distressing. In the classic sense, we – children of these people – are supposed to feel lost.

No connection to a space beyond the enslaved one, no history before that institution. And what of the history thereafter? Well, we, like the institution, were supposed to disappear. We were supposed to go to Liberia or be impoverished in an America that preferred World War II refugees to those Americans born of African origin. We were supposed to be as ashamed of our lack of an “America, the land of the free” narrative, as I was made to feel in seventh grade for not having an immigrant ancestor. In the classic sense, I am still supposed to feel lost.

But, I have never had the luxury of feeling or being lost. This very present family, in this very fixed space of America, in an expanse of time immemorial leaves me firmly rooted. Thankfully, firmly rooted. As I better understand diaspora formation, I am more clearly able to understand how distinct and unique my history is from other dispersal narratives.

Just because we all came by boat, except for Native Americans (Mexicans and Canadians), we didn’t all come with the same tale. And, for me, there’s something voluntary and knowing about identifying as an immigrant. For individuals there may be more push factors than pull factors, but immigration is still a choice. In that, I don’t share the immigrant narrative and I simply never will.

We haven’t all shared in the belief of America as an idea. And we don’t all share it equally now. We all have our different stories, none more valid than others, but certainly the immigrant protagonist is more valorized than say my forefathers. Despite what I may share with my peers of immigrant origin in the tale of downtrodden ancestors making something upon which we now stand, I feel a sense of relief in my ability to be American – with no caveats, no undue deference, and no remorse.

I am thankful for my ability to own my Blackness in this American space, without thought of justification or apology. I owe this place nothing, yet it is my everything. I believe this sense of rootedness, despite its original formation, has empowered me to roam the rest of the earth undoubtedly confident of who I am and what I am made of. My family is not mythical. My sense of entitlement (no matter how hard-earned and at times unwarranted) to my identity and my place in my country, past and present, is unwavering.

I am the daughter of a African-American billing agent and an African-American techie nerd, who were the first-college degreed children of an African-American military photographer & an African-American amateur model, and an African-American AT&T/ Bell South factory worker and an African-American Bear Sterns maintenance worker. They being children of African-American sharecroppers, and an Irish man and an African-American woman with epilepsy. (Hey! Nobody told me about this paternal great-grandfather in seventh grade, because he supposedly raped said Floridian great-grandmother. And, were it true, it would be just as true to the African-American narrative as chitterlings and the Baptist church.)

I could go on, but I fear it would all be redundant and self-glorifying. It’s safe to say that I am not of Garveyists or Germans, not of French Creoles or Holocaust victims. We are not all immigrants (or descendants of immigrants), and we don’t have to be – to be American.