Immigrant Shame and Indigenous Melancholy
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Rajiv’s melancholia comes primarily from his disconnect with Bhojpuri, Hindi and Hinduism. This contrasts with–and partially results from–his father’s aggressive rejection of their heritage. Rajiv wanted to learn the language of his Aji, sing her songs, and listen to her talk about the Ramayana so that he could “learn the deep ocean of stories of where [he] came from” (Mohabir 19). His father, however, went by an English name, practised Christianity, and expressed anger when his family showed an interest in their Indian heritage. He even went so far as to destroy his wife’s only physical connection to her family (21).
As cruel as this behaviour is for the family around him, Rajiv acknowledges that this was a survival strategy his father had to adopt in a colonial context. One way he does this is by Anglifying his speech when talking to white people, using “potato” instead of “aloo”, for instance (20). In thinking about it, I realized that my father would often do the same. His Guyanese Creole became nearly non-existent in public, but when he was around his siblings and extended family, it would come out in full. Masking and code-switching are common mechanisms that racialized people use to cope with environments that ostracize or punish them for diverging from the white standard. Ironically, the grandchildren of the white people who shamed our grandparents for their language have turned it into their college major (Mohabir 38).
As Rajiv’s story makes clear, his melancholia begins with his physical separation from India and Guyana. After reading about Lallie’s story in Khatun’s chapter in Australianama, however, I wondered if Ahmed’s concept of melancholia could also apply to indigenous peoples as much as it could to migrants and their descendants. Being displaced from the homeland is one thing, but what happens when someone is displaced within the homeland?
Khatun explains that, with the Aborigines Act of 1905, children under sixteen who were born to an Aboriginal mother and a non-Aboriginal father (called “half-castes”) were legally under the parentage of the state (158). Being a “half-caste”, Lallie was under police surveillance and was later imprisoned in an institution. After multiple escape attempts, she was restricted by law from entering Western Australia again. With this, she was cut off from her mother, the desert she was raised in, and the stories of the Tjukurpa that she was only beginning to learn. Where Rajiv had to traverse a language barrier to connect with his Aji, Lallie had to traverse a legal one to connect with her mother, which she attempted to do until her mother died (160). Though Lallie’s inner thoughts are not expressed like Rajiv’s in this reading, I can imagine that people like her–whose connection to their land and culture has been denied to them–can yearn for their roots as much as a migrant can. In the same ways that unassimilable migrants are seen as incompatible or even threats to Western societies, indigenous melancholy compromises the foundations of a “White Australia”.
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The first part of your post where you discuss code switching and survival strategies, including the rejection of heritage, touches on something I find incredibly profound. As Rajiv says: "How was it that these people who I came from hated themselves so much that they would rather kiss a white person's ass than call themselves Indians?"
I think this idea of 'self-hatred' strikes a much harder chord than the term 'melancholia' might, and continues the idea that Integration is, at its core, a truly heinous concept. This self-hatred is born out of the struggle for migrants to renounce their heritage and fully adopt their 'new culture', but it's impossible for someone to truly forsake their past lives and lived experiences. We are who we are because of the things we've experienced. In rejecting one's culture and past, they are simultaneously rejecting their very being. Integration without self-hatred is impossible.
This self-hatred manifests in many different ways, all in an attempt to bury their history. Rajiv's father burning his mother's books and incense, his aunties making fun of him for attempting to learn Hindi, the anger of Rajiv's father when his Aji teaches him songs, they're all actions designed to make Rajiv not want to connect with his heritage. They're all actions of self-hatred, of embarrassment.
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Adding to this idea of self-hatred, it’s striking to see how the notion parallels Khatun’s critique of white Australia’s obsession with progress narratives. Khatun emphasizes how the movement of non-white women goes against linearity—appearing almost dreamlike, as they traverse borders and identities in ways that reject the rigid path from "traditional" to "modern."
Nonetheless, these very progress narratives have been internalized by non-white families like Rajiv's, who bear the weight of their ancestors’ complex journeys: "For her, going to India was a reversion to an uncouth past. To return from India would mean that I would come back less intelligent, having regressed." To believe in this progress narrative is to further engage in self-hatred, to discard ancestral narratives and epistemes. It’s depressing to see how deeply these attitudes, nurtured by whiteness, have taken root.
This idea of melancholia extending to indigenous peoples is also interesting. Ahmed’s definition suggests a melancholia rooted in not knowing, an ignorance that shapes the migrant experience. But for indigenous peoples, knowledge of what their land once was—and could still be—is painfully clear. For many melancholics (not all), their landscapes are dead fictions. For many indigenous peoples, that death is still ongoing, all around them.