By Emily Lee
I was at a holiday party a few years ago. The gathering of friends and family included aunts, uncles, great aunts, great uncles, grandparents, friends, neighbors, friends of neighbors, and many distant cousins—so many that I’d forgotten some of their names. On the periphery of a large and loud Italian-American family, I can attest to the fact that this demographic is common. Everyone assembles around the table burdened by the excessive volume of food placed atop. As we loosen our belts and dig in for second, third, or fourth helpings of antipasto, the wine flows ever more freely and so does candid conversation. And although there’s no shortage of alimentation, the one thing you’ll never find in the dining room is political correctness.
Another cork pops at the conclusion of a lively talk on state and local taxes. We’d already moved from religion to politics—topics a beginner’s etiquette class would encourage one to avoid in favor of polite dinner conversation.
The next topic on deck is race, because it just isn’t a holiday meal without a conversation on race.
And of course, in the spirit of a Christian holiday, it’s only natural to discuss the peculiarities and shortcomings of those who are different from us. Over the years, I’ve noticed that older people—people of my grandparents’ generation—cannot come to terms with the idea of interracial marriage, be they Christian, Jewish, Republican, Democrat, Independent, anarchist, etc. Some will admit their qualms more freely than others, but the sentiment is almost always there. The elders become ornery.
“What is it with young people today? Do they want everyone to look the same?”
“It’s just not fair to the children. Their lives will be harder.”
And my personal favorite: “One day, we’re all going to be brown.”
Of course, the solutions to their anxieties are simple. Regarding the fear of a loss of racial boundaries: it would, I suppose, take centuries of continuous interracial mating in order for all of the races to “blend.” So it isn’t something these elders at the dinner table should fear in their lifetime.
I grew up with a number of biracial friends and, as far as I can tell, their lives have faced the same things that plague everybody in the trajectory of life. Surely, being a white woman comes with a different social experience than being a person of color, or biracial. But as friends, outside of the politics of it all, we faced the same joys, challenges, and qualms as any child would. And if someday, “everybody will be brown”, then I say hallelujah. Sunblock is expensive. Especially SPF 50. I know this all too well.
The British Raj dissolved in 1947. The Crown abolished slavery in Jamaica in 1834. We, here in America, abolished it in 1860. Yet it seems as though some people would have it that we are not at liberty, even in 2012, to exercise free will when joining sperm and egg. Are we truly, as those in my literary persuasion would say, in a “post-colonial” world?
Lately I’ve been thinking about Kipling’s “Lispeth”—a short story about a Kotgarh Hill-girl in the Himachal Pradesh state of India, who converted to Christianity. This piece was both an invention of Kipling’s imagination and a reality of his observations in India. With the stamina to trek over twenty miles to neighboring villages, and the innocence to love at first sight, Lispeth’s strength and beauty are eroticized and hyperbolized. She is every colonialist’s worst nightmare. She is, in every sense, “the other.”
When Lispeth’s parents’ maize crop fails, they bring her to the Kotgarh Chaplain and convert her to Christianity. Her baptismal name, Elizabeth, is later shortened in the local dialect to “Lispeth.” After cholera takes her parents, Lispeth is left to the care of the Chaplain and his wife, for whom she becomes “half servant, half companion.”
Published in 1886, the story is wrought with colonial anxieties regarding interracial sex and marriage. Upon rescuing an injured Englishman, the Chaplain and his wife lecture Lispeth on “the impropriety of her conduct,” but alas, “it takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilised Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight”—a moment highlighting Kipling’s sly sarcasm and disenchantment with the rigidity of Occidental decorum.
As it turns out, the Englishman is engaged to an English girl back home—a girl like me, who would have benefitted from sunblock, or at the very least, a bonnet. A girl who is safe, sensible, and most of all, appropriate. But that didn’t stop the English mountaineer from wooing Lispeth over the course of his slow recovery. “Being a savage by birth, [Lispeth] took no trouble to hide her feelings, and the Englishman was amused.” To avoid dramatics on the eve of his departure, the Chaplain’s wife encourages the Englishman to promise Lispeth that he will soon return for her hand in marriage. Lispeth is placated. But months pass, and she grows impatient. Eventually, the Chaplain’s wife explains that the Englishman will not return.
‘Then you have lied to me,’ said Lispeth.
The Chaplain’s wife bowed her head, and said nothing. Lispeth was silent too for a little time; then she went out down the valley, and returned in the dress of a Hill-girl—infamously dirty, but without the nose-stud and ear-rings. She had her hair braided into the long pigtail, helped out with black thread, that Hill-women wear.
‘I am going back to my own people,’ said she. ‘You have killed Lispeth… You [English] are all liars.’
Although Lispeth is a full-blooded Kotgarh girl, I now see her as an embodiment of the interracial person so many fear, and fear for. Bitter and disillusioned, she is a product of cross-cultural interactions, plagued by an identity crisis, and rejection from both native and Western spheres. ‘Her own people hated her because she had, they said, become a white woman and washed herself daily; and the Chaplain’s wife did not know what to do with her.’
But it isn’t the fault of reckless youth, exercising indiscretion and choosing sexual partners outside of racial and cultural boundaries, thereby creating a new category of culturally confused and racially ambiguous people—as the holiday party-goers would have had me believe.
Instead, it is fear of a loss of those boundaries that isolates one another—the desire to make those who are different from us more like us, while maintaining separatism by denying complete acceptance. While I do believe Kipling was an imperialist, he was, at the end of the day, as much a part of the problem as he was part of the solution, for it was important—and still is—to write candidly about isolation, and how we isolate—both ourselves, and others. Kipling addressed imperialist-imposed racial isolation. And as members of the 21stcentury, we too have a host of impositions to tackle, to expose the fear, and to work through it.
Next Christmas, I’ll be sure to pass Xerox copies of his writing around the table. Maybe it will be harder to defend hypocrisy when it’s right in front of our faces. And maybe I’ll bring up my point about the SPF 50 too.
Emily Lee is a graduate student in the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Masters Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. Her research focuses on the history and literature of Victorian England and early 20th century America. She recently completed a collection of forty poems as part of her undergraduate thesis and dabbles in all other genres of writing. Starting this fall, she’ll be teaching reading to awesome school kids in Brooklyn.
