Intersectionality of being a women and a minority + avoiding the past

[humaira_abedin]

Australianama

Samia describes nikkah and mahar as products of an economy that society was part of in the Australian context. According to the author, it led to many histories of women, especially women who married Muslim men to be viewed as being purchases in the lives of their partners or by the eyes outside of the couple. Samia, however, introduces an alternative way to write these stories of women around their gender relations and experiences, as men were highly contrasted as people with agency and movement, compared to women who were not because of their associations with "brideprice/mehr".
This alone does not bear the fault, as colonial ideologies around subjugation and patriarchy were also enforced on these women by Australians and South Asians/Afghans.
Women were marginalized inside and outside of their homes. Their roles were often defined through their relationships to men. Their value was often measured in economic terms, whether through the direct exchange of bride price or through the implicit commodification of reproductive roles in colonial society and women's work in general.

Though there was an overlap of Australian and South Asian/Afghan cultures, the latter was still seen as people who needed interventions as "improving women's right, accounts of bride price in Afghanistan have circulated alongside narratives of honour crimes, polygamy and forced marriages" (p.144). This passage displays that a lot cultural, and not necessarily religious concepts were seen as one big inferior way of life that needed change.

There were also racialist discourses in governing marriages. In the case of Lallie Matbar, an Aboriginal woman, and her Indian husband, both of them were seen as non-white immigrants. Lallie, was seen as someone exploitable by others and problematic to the Australian social order by mixing racial categories which further made her more suspectable to surveillance and unequal benefits from the colonial powers. Contrary to typical narratives of women's lifestyle of being static in displacement and movement when they get their nikkah done, she has been constantly in movement and making journeys to avoid harm.

Antiman

A common theme across many of the readings thus far is the use of storytelling and story preservation as a form of resilience against painful memories and experiences. The author's Aji used the story of Ram and Sita in this case. She uses it to cope with her melancholic feelings as she feels she can relate to it, therefore a means to connect with herself privately.
Rajiv's melancholy presents itself as trying to find answers for something that they feels is lacking to have a complete version of their identity. They pursue learning Hindi/Bhojpuri very explicitly in contrast to Aji, despite it being seen by his father as regressive or going backward. For their father, melancholy is like how Rajiv described it when eating cake: "took the white cake deep into our intestine" (p.22). The father completely enveloped himself with the white norms around him, enough for it to be part of his living and breathing body so that cultures and values outside of that do not penetrate his body anymore, ultimately preventing his family heritage from entering his mind and heart. He was brought up a certain way, that excluded his Hinduness and has negative emotions attached to it, thus does not wish to bring the past back to the present.