A Love Letter to Troublemakers

In Rage,

Sai Karavadi

 

What does it mean to be educated? To be learnéd? In terms of what it means to know, universities seem to have a monopoly on access when published articles are either behind paywalls or stuck in archives. And yet, here we are, trying to spend what little privilege we have in these academic spaces that do not validate our fruits as anything more than spectacle. Here we are, in a country full of immigrants, begging for someone to listen to our pain.

 

As we’re writing our final exams and papers, I wonder to myself how my peers feel. Do they feel like they’ve really learned something this semester? How are our professors not excruciatingly overwhelmed by news of a new variant every couple months compounded by a semester that just keeps pushing forward at the same pace, predictably and yet completely unpredictable?

 

I’m sitting here alone in my room in New York City, looking and thinking at everything passing me by. There are baby showers outside my window and the cops are only a couple blocks away. I keep staring out that window at the so-called red brick stone building obstructing my view of the skyline. I can tell when it’s sunny or downcast without seeing the clouds. I can breathe the air without opening my door. But there’s something about this city that I still can’t touch.

 

I can’t remember the last time I thought in my native, mother, first… tongue? Language? What is communication but a messy haptic sensibility, an expression of the messiness of life — a sign of disorder and failure. A generative failure that does not speak truth, but instead lies. Others may disagree, but I love a lie. I love telling lies, weaving daydreams with my various tongues and voices, speaking a language nobody can understand. I can’t hear myself anymore.

 

It’s like the sounds that are everywhere are stuck in my head and I’m still trying to separate them from the music ringing in my ears from my headphones on the way to class. I don’t know how to turn down the voices telling me that this isn’t for me or to be wary or to run. I can see the campus buildings now and I walk in before a security guard looks me up and down while I hold up my COVID screener and ID, before nodding to let me in. I can feel their eyes follow me, whether they’re actually watching or not, waiting to see if this brown kid in all black clothes is about to pull a stunt, before I’m out of their view.

 

Schizophrenia? ADHD? OCD? Am I ill? Is it wrong that I hear one voice reminding me of my skin color, another of my sexuality, and another of my gender each time I think, speak, or act? Is it wrong that I feel a tense tightness in my chest everywhere I go, out of fear and dysmorphia? I can’t explain this feeling of disorientation and anxiety, but I know that when I speak, the words “gay” and “faggot” flash through people’s minds. I know that when I’m seen, the words “brown,” “dirty,” “terror,” and “immigrant” flash through people’s minds.

 

And I’m tired. Tired of being a repository for other people’s affects. It’s exhausting to wade through the many voices reminding me that this world is never safe for me. Reminding me that, out of every single person and industry in the world, I can’t name a single artist who speaks the words I do and I’m tired of searching alone. I know they’re out there of course, but nothing will ever be enough for me until I make it myself. Because that is the only way to do me, to stage me, to perform (a) me; one that is born and dies through each step, sound, breath, and moment.

 

Trying to convince me to put faith in demands limited to specific gains — whether citizenship rights or marriage equality — is a futile effort that will lead to my walking away from the waste of time that was just brought to me. This country is exhausting. It is a place where people who have been subjugated are forced to resort to compromising for even a symbolic gain like anti-discrimination laws that are used to protect abusers instead of victims, whether it’s the gay and trans* panic defense or stand-your-ground laws. It’s sad that a police officer being vindicated for full-on murder is a remarkable event. It’s tiring to see people murder and deadname queer and trans* people of color that look like me on almost a weekly basis, at worst. It’s ridiculous to be in classes while our relatives are on their deathbeds. It’s actually just incredible that, to be a student in 2021 is to come back “home” to campuses where bodies of COVID victims are buried nearby and rents have gone down in New York City, undoubtedly partially due to the deaths of thousands of residents. But somehow, this university keeps running, receiving a record-high number of applications for both NYU and colleges in general, despite feeding students watermelon chicken salads and ignoring dietary restrictions.

 

To be a student in 2021 in New York City means being local witnesses to our peers and friends being arrested for protesting at the Met Gala while people of the same age organize a celebration of a country that has spent its entire lifetime generating genocide, and the first African American and South Asian woman to become vice president asks the department of justice to approve trying these people as terrorists only weeks before another white boy gets away with murder. Yet most people have already moved on.

 

Raising yet another generation of adults who believe themselves exceptionally different because they parade in liberal fantasies and give up after a week of public rage, not that I am any less culpable than my peers. People get stabbed at other colleges in the city while NYU “protects” us with hyper-vigilant surveillance and active NYPD presence, and driving up local rent until only the extremely wealthy can afford to live near Washington Square. I still remember when my non-black professor used the n-word where it wasn’t even written in a Toni Morrison book, but the university decided an email warning was a sufficient punishment. Almost every single student has a shocking revelation about this incredibly problematic school we attend at some point during their time here, only to continue attending (in most cases). I look around me and wonder how some of my classmates feel so proud to be activists or forward thinkers when they’ve done absolutely nothing for anyone but their own ego in that project of “becoming better.” But am I even much better? Doubtful.

 

So now I’m sitting here in shock. Writing through the mental pain of thinking in English, of knowing I once thought in Telugu and can never get back to that, and knowing that I am nothing special, but perhaps I am novel. I know that I hate the way that the English department decides what a study of literature is, as though only an American context matters in what is, arguably, one of the most global and diverse student bodies in the country. Or that somehow a rigorous knowledge of Shakespeare makes one more prepared to conduct literary analysis or pursue professional opportunities than an international study of playwrights or epics. But I guess we shouldn’t expect this administration to abandon the archive of white supremacy in teaching us how to read, write, and think. Because what a shame it would be if our students didn’t learn to think like a Christian or in proper English. So when I throw a middle finger up at Thomas More or this department, I offer no sympathy or respect, but out of professional obligation and intellectual admiration, and also at least for the educators that have ruptured that model, in whatever small ways they can. 

 

There will never be enough representation, enough retaliation, enough liberation, or enough energy to convince me that this world is ever safe for me. I don’t even believe the words I’m typing out in this very moment are free of attachments to the mistakes, trauma, and anxiety that plague the very essence of who I am. But I am enraged.

 

I am downright angry that I have spent so much time and money into reading the writings of people that murdered my brethren and ancestors using these techniques. I am disgusted to be, at least in some small part, proficient at masquerading as an intellectual or academic in these spaces by conforming to their models. And I have had to spend the better part of this semester attempting, frustratingly, to unlearn those things. Perhaps there is value in the drama of teaching the same thing over and over again for hundreds of years, as though literature hasn’t changed, but if I’m being frank and honest, I don’t care. And attempting to convince me to will feel just a little too close to the same way these authors serviced the colonization of the Global South, and still do.

 

So this is me screaming. Writhing. Scratching my claws. Because there really is never a good enough response to this challenge. But this university, its English department, and all of us (including me) just keep floating through classes and semesters. 

 

I want it all to burn.

 

I don’t want to be scared to hope or dream. I don’t want young queer and trans* kids of color to be scared. But I know there most likely will never be a world where that will ever be true. And coming to grips with that, especially for young people still trying to figure out how to reconcile their radicalism with the practical demands and contradictions of living in a capitalist colony (where settlers have indigenized themselves to the land so much that they accuse actual natives of illegal immigration, somehow lacking awareness of the fact that they murdered millions to “steal” – if ownership of land can be deemed legitimate at all – this land), means also understanding that there is no possible way to articulate a truly free future for ourselves without giving up the terms of the world we live in. Easy for me to say I guess, but almost impossible to understand, let alone accomplish or even try to do.

 

But I think there is something beautiful about queer and trans* people of color. There is something beautiful about the ways that we live impossible lives where we make impossible dreams into realities through every second that we continue to perform. Let’s dwell in that. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep running and dancing and singing and being. Being, huh? Loaded word in a philosophical sense, but I never cared much for dictionaries or the silly notion that a white guy from hundreds of years ago has any relevant authority on how I mess with language. This is all just to get to where we’re trying to steal away to I guess — an understanding that queer and trans* people of color are born rebels, diviners, dreamers — whatever you want to call it. We are a people that have to dream, that have to dwell in fantasy, that have to imagine something else than where we are, to keep pushing forward.

 

So I will make trouble. Lie. Steal. Cling to whatever it is that lets me scream, cry, sing, or feel. You don’t need to try to be nice. Stop apologizing. Desire everything. This is an ode to messiness, an ode to disorientation, an ode to everything that both is and isn’t, that never was and always will be, to the wastelands, the borderlands — but this is not a call to arms. It is not a call to picket lines or street marches that keep happening in the background of a society that is itself built on a daily structure of terrorized control. It is a reminder that some of us don’t get to choose whether we are target practice. There is an energy in the world these days — an unhappiness and displeasure with reality — so let’s take advantage and fuck it all up.

 

I don’t care if people can’t keep up with the letters we add to LGBTQIA+; I don’t care if you voted for a democrat; I don’t care if you’re in the GSA; I don’t care if you’re uncomfortable; I don’t care if you think that white men won’t have as much power in the future — because the marginalized are not obligated to give any care to the desires, ideas, or interests of anyone but our-selves. What motive do we have to be ethical when this world has diagnosed our own survival tactics as mental illness? Every single day, the people in power try to organize and control more and more, but there is something impossible to control about living, breathing fantasies.

 

Be afraid. Watch in awe. Listen closely. But keep your mouth shut. Keep your mind entranced. Nobody can stop the gay agenda.