some thoughts on Partition

[[This newsletter contains some references and spoilers to Ms Marvel Episode 5, if you aren’t caught up!]]

I’m writing on behalf of myself, as an artist & person. My views and history are solely mine & not the property of any company!

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I remember that my history textbooks rarely covered South Asia, and when they did it was reduced to a one sentence statement about how Gandhi led a nonviolence movement that ended British colonization. When you actually learn the history, you realize how that does not encapsulate what happened. Partition was one of the bloodiest humanitarian crises of the modern era, resulting in 14 million refugees and 2-3 million people being killed due to retributive genocides. The pain of Partition, and its silences, can still be felt today. And yet, most people have no idea what it is. It begs the question—what is considered nonviolent? Whose bodies do we look away from when violence occurs? Whose bodies are made to endure what? And whose bodies are silenced, forgotten about in history books, rewritten?

The erasure of Partition from my education as well as the silence of Partition in my own communities had a very strange bodily and psychological effect on myself as I’m sure it did on others. Growing up South Asian in America, folks kind of treated me and my family as though we were history-less, as though our lives only started when we arrived to this country. That was further complicated by the fact that I was an orphan, and didn’t have access to my parents or their stories. In a way, I felt a kind of weird dual-historylessness, a very painful and lonely erasure of myself, my people, and my being from the connected fabric of history.

This is of course, the American ideal. So many central American stories revolve around orphans who are historyless and make their way out of nothing. So much of America’s narrative of itself is based on the idea of an erased history, of not acknowledging its own violent history, of rewriting itself into a brand-new start, of forgetting its interconnectedness. And that breeds diseases. We see the disease of that playing out in our current moment: mass shootings, white supremacy, the continual collective and specific violence towards Black people, Indigenous people, Latinx people, Asian people and Muslim people. When we’re not connected to our histories, our cultures; when we don’t learn and take accountability from past violence’s, when we act like they didn’t exist—we repeat the same patterns.

My families’ stories weren’t in alignment with what I was reading in history books. So, I started to map out the history for myself, by looking at the work of so many people who had done it before me for decades. I started to try and read everything I could. When I finally found books that were actually about what happened, written by South Asian authors, I would carry them with me for weeks and months and show everyone. (I have forgotten this fact but my friend Jamila reminded me of it this week lol I think about me in my early 20s casually carrying around big ass books on Partition and showing them to anyone who would listen to me). Engaging this history was hard work for so many reasons: one being that there is so much silence around Partition because of how traumatic it is and because of how these stories were folded, rewritten and sometimes corrupted for nationalistic and patriotic narratives, and because the stories are so painful that even reading a sliver of one is incredibly gutting, could have you on the floor for hours completely bereft at what humans are capable of doing to each other.

It's not an easy history. Especially when you put Partition in the context of a larger history—when you contend with the Bangladeshi Liberation War and Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh, when you contend with the ongoing genocide against Muslim people in India today and the rise of Modi, when you contend with Pakistan’s suppression of Ahmadiyya Muslims, Shia, Hindu, Sikhs, and other ethnic and religious based minorities. When you see the way many countries throughout South Asia, including Pakistan and India, systematically oppress Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi people. When you contend with Pakistan and India’s ongoing occupation of Kashmir. And when you see how those lines of division still carry over across diaspora, into different countries, and how the history still repeats itself.

And as my friend Amina told me as I was doing so much of this work—you’re allowed a complicated history. Partition isn’t an easy history in part because it defied binary concepts of good and bad that we’re taught in the west. Partition is neighbors killing neighbors. It’s retributive genocides. It’s forced displacement on every side. It’s gambles of power. Its white men drawing arbitrary lines through very complicated regions. It’s elites profiting off of land and power grabs while ordinary people are murdered and separated from their families. And it’s an event that effected millions and millions of people, and millions and millions of their descendants. And yet—especially in the west—there are such few depictions of it and conversations about it.

And while religion was the central definer of the divides of Partition, faith was not. Religion as identity was. As depicted in fictional books like Train to Pakistan, one could not always simply ‘convert’ to a different religion in order to stay in your land. It didn’t matter if your faith had led you to convert to a different religion in your lifetime or if you were non-practicing. When the divides of Partition happened, when the mobs came, you were defined as the religion you were born as, and that was it.  

When I was younger and learned about History, I thought that it was a static thing. A thing that happened in the past, that was stuck in a year or date that seemed so foreign to me. The more I learned I realized that’s not the way that anything works—Partition isn’t relegated to the year 1947. It’s the factors that lead to it, that were planted around it long before, it’s the way that it continues to ripple long after. It’s how the cycles keep repeating themselves, the weight that folks move with after, how it alters and affects people. History is very alive, very much influencing the present, and continually rippling through all of us. Whether we choose to engage it or not.

When I was writing poems about Partition while I was shaping If They Come For Us, I kept getting the question—why? Why bring this up? Why write about this pain? Why peel the layer back? What was heartbreaking was that this wasn’t just coming from people who weren’t South Asian—though the vast majority of those thoughts were coming from those folks. But there would occasionally be South Asian artist who I deeply admired who would express that to me, who would make me feel bad for needing to write through my own history. When I started to publish the poems that would make up If They Come For Us all the partition poems were rejected from journals. I stopped reading them out loud. I knew the poems meant everything to me, that to me they made up the big heart of the book, and a huge part of my life, but perhaps no one else could see it.

I remember around the time the book was first publish a friend of mine tweeted out the first Partition poem that I had in the book, and the response was one of the biggest responses I had ever had to a singular poem. It was so helpful to see how the poem, a poem that touched so deeply on my pain, resonated with people, and how even though literary journals were rejecting it, the poem had an organic life of its own online, how it moved to reach the people that it needed to. And then I started to see how people started to react to the Partition poems in my book as a whole, and the conversations that I would have in Q&A’s and interviews with fellow South Asian people, and fellow people of color who all had suffered silences and erasures in their own history. And it became so clear to me that we just all need to do whatever we can to get our own stories, our own histories out in the world, to do what we can to push back against our own erasing, and to have people contend with us fully, which includes contending with our histories.

Why do you always write about the ugly things? My uncle asked me once. I know this history is painful, but I write about it because I need to. Because it lives in me. Because it’s divided us. Because we all suffer from this wound. And because many of us suffer from it and don’t even know how, because it’s not talked about, because we’ve been cut off from the work to see it. When I was on tour with my book, there was so many times where my audiences would articulate never having heard of Partition. And there were times where those audience members were South Asian. And I was like—yes. It’s very hard to know your history when it’s not taught in the country you’re growing up in. This is a thing, that was by design, orchestrated to be kept from you. We were taught to ignore our histories. To view ourselves as historyless.

There’s also the very complicated part about touching into trauma that someone has experienced first-hand that is both yours and not yours. It’s yours because it’s inherited, because the body carries it, because it’s passed on genetically to us and influences us. It’s yours because your body holds it. It’s yours because it’s the hope you can rise to trying to understand it, to break familial and generational curses around it. And it’s not yours as in—you didn’t live through it. And someone else did. And as my sister Khudejha says, they don’t owe telling it to you, especially if it’s painful for them. And they’re also processing it on their own terms, and it takes so much to handle those convos with care so you don’t contribute to the furthering of their own trauma.

My friend and amazing writer Randa Jarrar said this beautiful thing to me once, that “families are not unions.” And it’s true. Families don’t have to all have the same experiences, political thoughts, interpretation of events. My own family is so vast and complicated and complex. I had many family members who survived partition and who carried the weight of loss of leaving their original lands. Some of those family members became incredibly patriotic to their new nation, believing that it would save them. Some of them held resentment towards their new nation and their past nation. Some of them held romanticization of their past land that was impossible to live up to. Some of them professed beautiful utopian ideas of a pan-South Asianness, while also sometimes succumbing to the humanness of categorization and resentment towards others that keeps us divided. Some never wanted to talk about Partition. And some did.

Bisha Ali, our showrunner and lead creator of the TV show Ms Marvel, was incredible at facilitating the room not from a place of ego, but from a true place of collaboration. Film and TV is so complicated, there are so many hands on it, so it’s so often actually a very collaborative medium. I love working with people who honor that collaborative process, who see people as brilliant and empower them to bring their best ideas to the creation of the project. That is very much the way Bisha operates. This was in so many large and small ways, and she was always so good at empowering the writers in the room to have ownership over the story, the show, the characters we were adapting and creating, and providing us places where we could write extremely personally even though we were writing on a big franchise show.

There’s a very brief two-page spread in the comics that alludes to Partition, and so we used that to have Partition be a central component of the series. Writing about Partition, and approaching my episode in particular, came from a deeply personal place for me. It came from years and years of academic, familial and artistic work that defined so much of my life, that shaped me, that made me see the world differently. It also came from years of engaging a painful history that lived so deep in my bones that it would sometimes surface and be so emotionally and physically painful to live with, and having to grapple with that.  

There were so many things that I factored in as I broke the story for, wrote and advocated for my episode. One of the most important things was that it was critical for me that the story of Partition coincided with a story of love. I didn’t want to engage Partition if it was just going to be a version of trauma-porn. In engaging a deeply traumatic event, it was deeply important for me that I lead this story with love, that I center a love story in it. That even as we show deep pain and trauma we show deep love, deep care, and how the only way that we are able to move through such dark and deep tragedy is through the softening of our own hearts, through love. Which is where Aisha and Hassan, my beautiful loves, come in. These characters came from really deep personal places in myself, as did the images of the roses.

In thinking about my episode, it was important to me that the Partition storyline be centered around a train. Trains are one of the most central figures of Partition—the haunting images of trains being packed with people, people sitting on top of the trains as they were en-mass trying to flee areas that they were no longer safe in. This is also a dual image: anyone who has done even a little bit of research into Partition know that these images evoke the refugees that were leaving, but also that sometimes trains would arrive in stations that had been attacked, where everyone on the train would have been massacred. There are so many stories of trains full of corpses arriving at stations, and the complete devastation of all of those people having been murdered. 

And ultimately it was important to me not only in my work with Ms Marvel, but my work with Partition as a whole, that the invoking of Partition is as a point of healing, of generational healing. That we were engaging our history to not just show it, but to show how necessary it is to understand how understanding this history, by facing it, by openly talking about it, can cut down cycles of disconnection and trauma between family members.  

All of the writers in the room—Sabir Pirzada, Aisha Bhoori, Will Dunn, Kate Gritmon, Sophie Miller and Freddy Syborn, and our showrunner & head creator—Bisha Ali, worked so hard for the Partition storyline to be in the show, to create the storyline with care and purpose, to do our best to make sure that we were approaching the story with love, and care and intention.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know ultimately, that’s what I write about this--- because I believe in a deep, unwavering love for our people. For my ancestors. For all they lived through, for all it took to get us here. A love strong enough to look at the difficult painful things and say: yes, this too. A love strong enough to acknowledge the complication of our painful lineages and say: yes, this too, is a thing I’ve inherited. A love strong enough to not look away. A love strong enough to love us in our history, even when it’s painful. And maybe, especially because it’s painful. To say—this is here. How can we learn from it? How can we be better? How can we commit to building a future where this never happens again?

Because it is happening. Right now. Of course, it’s not the same exact violence: we’re not contending with the immediate fall of the British empire, etc. The beast morphs. And so, how can we show up for each other to stop this? That we protect each other? That we love each other, and love each other by acknowledging our histories, by respecting our differences?

I think about having grown up in the West and never seeing any mention of this history in textbooks let alone in broader culture at large, to now having worked so closely on making sure that some of this history is shown on one of the biggest platforms in the world. I feel incredibly proud.

This is just a small glimpse into our worlds, our histories. And even though we might all be of a similar people, religion, race, or ethnicity, none of our worlds are the same, even in the same family. We have so many stories to tell. There is still so much work to do. So much work for all of us to do. So much more to say. So much more to create. So many ways to show up for each other. So many ways to keep building solidarity with each other. So many ways to create a better world. Onward.

xo  

I’m very grateful for the long lineage of people, artists, archivists, activists, uncles, grandparents, friends, who’ve worked to keep the stories of Partition alive, even as people have tried to erase them. Who’ve worked to break these silences. Whose bodies, whose beings, are so deeply radical in their existence and their refusal to be quiet. Their refusal to be erased. I am so honored and humbled to learn from them. To carry their books, their films, their songs, their poetry. & to always learn more, & to grow.

Here is a starter list of readings on Partition, for anyone interested.