When to be Queer? When to be Brown?
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The Antiman excerpt explores the familiar (to me) experience of being discouraged from indulging yourself in your culture and roots while also having parts of your identity be 'incompatible' with said culture. The narrator is a Brown and queer man attempting to connect with his roots by studying his ancestral language, translating it, transcribing songs, traveling to India, etc., despite his father's disapproval and insistence on remaining distant to his native culture and embracing Western culture. That embracing however, clearly has its limits. When the narrator comes out to his mother, she insists he should keep it a secret from his father, as its a taboo within Brown culture to be queer. In this instance, his mother is asking him to remain faithful to his cultural roots and to keep this secret to save his family from "shame" or "humiliation" they might face from the wider community/extended family. If his father wants him to stay away from his native culture, then that implies he should stay away from its beliefs and values, but if his mother asks him to remain queer in secret or to try and date women because his culture isn't queer-friendly, that implies that he should stay inline with the values and beliefs of his culture. I suppose the solution here would be to find a balance, just queer enough and just Brown enough, but that option implies a sacrifice, no matter what balance is found.
(This parallel was brought up in class, but I thought it was interesting as I had also thought about it while reading the excerpt)