By Janani Sreenivasan
Every month, to unwind, I compete in a spelling bee in Brooklyn.
I’m 29 years old, so it’s not for the fame or the pussy. Not anymore. This bee takes place in a bar. The regulars include a little boy and his father (the little boy usually outlasts his father), some old ladies, and some fiercely dedicated adult nerds, bibliophiles, “lifelong learners,” whatever you want to call us - lex addicts, I’ll take that too.
And regulars? Yes. We come for the education as much as for the humiliation. It is a very serious bee, run by a darkly funny GRE/SAT/GMAT instructor who chooses words not only from English but from Middle English, German, French, Portuguese, Algonquin, Hindi, and once, to our despair, the language of birds (swee-swee, the call of the yellow-bellied waxbill). Some of us keep running lists of the words. Sometimes, when our Jen has read an especially evil word (“peroemia,” “ispaghul”), there are cries of laughter and despair. Once, clueless (“feijoada,” a Portuguese bean stew) I spelled O-H-S-H-I-T and escorted myself offstage.
The prizes are modest: at the last bee I won a plush salmonella bacterium for placing third. When I think carefully about why I go, I admit it’s for the pleasure. Hearing a huge, complicated word, feeling it take shape in my brain photographically, sonically, three-dimensionally (rotating it like a 3D computer model), anatomically (how it feels in my throat, on my tongue), then experiencing how it twangs other neural connections to literature, cinema, music, old conversations, old encyclopedias, obscure Internet forums, all the remotest corners of the mind – just feels good. For me, learning new words (including people, animal, and place names) is on par with food tasting or thrift shopping – a flood of sensory novelty that arrives in discrete, manageable packets. Synesthesia kicks in: Yummy. Fruity. Stripey. Bubbly. I taste the word; I actually feel the dopamine flooding my brain. Feeling my ignorance disrupted, rended- there is something erotic about it. I admit it: sometimes I am even turned on by learning new words, almost as much as I am when people play seven-letter words against me in Scrabble and/or score over 100 points in a turn (People who do this: it’s not your fault, please don’t stop playing with me!) Lex addiction is real.
It just feels really good to engage with words. Yet whenever I get on the G train to go to the bee, I feel a twinge of shame, guilt, damnation, “gotcha” – a sense that I should go and find something more normal and twentysomething (soon thirtysomething) to do. Part of it is just my relationship with my own nerdiness in a society that sees nerds in terms of utility: un-whole. (Let them build and program and cure everything and be useful, just not…be anything else. Or feel anything. Or fuck anybody.) And a part that lingers, ridiculously, long after it should be gone, is a sense that I am fulfilling the terrible destiny of my terrible kind, my upward-clawing, robot kind, ice cold below the neck, all cortex, all intellect, no flesh, no heat…
Google “Indians and spelling bees.” You’re already on the Internet; you can do it. Every year for the last five years, the national champion has been brown. Every year, the same articles pop up, asking the same curious-but-not-too-curious questions: Why do they win? How do they do it? And every year, the articles answer themselves the same way: rote study, family commitment, teamwork, respect for education, discipline, work ethic…the usual model minority checklist. One article (by an Indian, interestingly enough) begins, “The annual ritual where Indians demonstrate that they are smarter than everyone else.”
No!
I do not spell to demonstrate this! I spell because I am a bibliophile! And a pervert!
I spell because I am human, a human with urges! A human who likes tasty
things, and just happens to be able to taste words!
It’s true I did bees as a child, just school ones and one local one. (My parents: laid-back. They didn’t help me study, they didn’t quiz me. I would probably have bitten them if they had tried: I loved to teach myself.) In middle school, already clued to the social costs of public displays of intelligence, already ragingly Urkel-esque and rampaging the school in hiked-up orange leggings and nylon jackets, already grossed out by all versions of “femininity,” and realizing I barely wanted to participate in the emerging culture of mating and courting between my (mostly white) classmates, I used the school bee as a platform, naturally, for standup comedy. Given “scrawny” to spell, I assessed myself - tiny, a year younger than my class, exposed, bug-eyed, and brown in front of all my bemused classmates – one of them a tall, beautiful Mormon soccer player I idolized, maybe even loved? I took all this in.
The word tasted ugly, looked ugly, like loose, hanging, stubbly flesh. That sagging, udderlike middle: scraw, scraw. But I liked words about ugliness and flaw, often words I had learned from folk tales. Gnarled. Crippled. Puny. Scrawny. I liked ugly, outcast creatures. I liked myself.
Part of continuing to like myself, my survival in that public moment, lay in my actively claiming my social inferiority: accepting and celebrating my ugliness, my oddness -- my Urkelness. Never would I look like the other kids – never would I be as human as they were, as real or as beautiful. Never would I be truly integrated into their lives. And never, never would I make them as happy as they seemed to make each other.
I was not sad about this – cheerful, in fact. It was just how things were, how I’d turned out. I had read, and written, a lot of stories that celebrated outcasts. I likedmyself this way, this ugly, freakish way. Like an ogre who had scared the townspeople, I would prove my good heart, prove that I was safe to know, that they shouldn’t come after me with torches and clubs (years later, a white friend would recall that he had indeed been “scared” of me). So I joked into the microphone:
“Scrawny…as in ME?”
The laughter – sudden, and long, and strong, and very joyful - made me feel safe. I had found my role.
Now I am old enough to look back and feel sad about the way I saw myself. I am also old enough to understand that the woes of any highly educated child with professional parents are, in the big scheme of things…puny. But it bothers me to hear the way people – most often white people, white journalists, white media - talk about Indian bee kids, it bothers me to imagine the kids being observed with that mixture of fascination and fear my friend felt long ago. Is it appreciation -- or threat assessment? Here is a fun thing to do: look up the winners of the American national spelling bee from 1925 on. In the early days they had names like Pauline, Dorothy, Ward, Marian, Louis, Doris (DORIS!), until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 welcomed in a slew of Indian professionals, two of whom probably raised and/or quizzed the 1985 winner, Balu Natarajan. Then, in 1988, Rageshree Ramachandran. Then another line of Scott, Amy, Joanne, Amanda, until 1999, when Indians started winning every other year, until finally, from 2008-2012, it’s been all Indians, every year. Perhaps, to the un-brown, it has the looks of a horde, a stampede, an influx of brownness and weird-name-ness and tribal allegiance (families who study together!) and robotic conformity, the rise of the superautomatons: your brown overlords are coming.
Can you say “monster minority”? And a monster doesn’t have to be openly monstrous, as I once thought I was. Poking around Internet spelling bee conversations, I came across this jolly piece of white supremacy:
The National Scripps one has become an Indian/Chinese ghetto. They are more than able to compete, but there is no cachet associated with it anymore. Neither is there any sense of competition, or challenge, when up against students who robotically memorize the dictionary. Compare today's spelling bee to the one recounted in Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little Town on the Prairie." The spelling bee is an American invention, meant to foster a sense of community along with the learning of proper spelling and enhancing one's vocabulary. Having Rajesh mechanically compete with Sanjay does not inspire American kids to join in. Another example of diversity changing and ultimately destroying a unique piece of historical White, Christian, American culture.
“Robotically memorize.” “Mechanically compete.” “American kids.” Sounds like the road to social integration and acceptance is still under construction and backed up for miles! Poor Rajesh and Sanjay: you’re just so threatening. Be sure to apologize for it by growing up, putting away the spelling, and pursuing professions that will drive the economy forward and fulfill the dominant group’s auxiliary needs while letting them forget that you’re, you know, human. And whole. (Why is it so much harder for brown people to get ahead in politics or mass media? Because it requires people who don’t look like them not only to identify with them but to cede a little power: to hand off the task of representation.) In my darker, more absurd moments of thinking about these children, I envision a factory where pudding is made: yes, pudding, nutritious pudding snacks, made from the pureed brains of the national bee winners. Why? The educational-agricultural-industrial complex, of course. The wish to capitalize on these interloping brown kids’ giant brain capacity without actually admitting them into society or acknowledging their sovereign points of view. In this demented factory’s inner chambers the children study; the more words they study, the smarter and sweeter their brains become, like ripening fruit. (I imagine the brain of 2010 bee winner Anamika Veeramani to be particularly sweet, as she used to study sixteen hours a day.) When the brains are ripe enough according to the strict quality control standards of the pudding factory, lab techs remove the tissue (some brains come with tiny chunks of motherboard, the motherboards that spelling bee journalists and racist blog trolls imagine all Indian children to be born with). The procedures supposedly don’t hurt the children because, per society’s image of them, they’re so naturally surgically talented, so predestined to earn their M.D.’s through rote memorization, that even after brain and motherboard removal, they can sew their own heads back together and go about their business as if nothing had ever happened. However, most of the children die from the extraction. Meanwhile, the sweet, sweet brain pudding gets packaged in squeezey tubes (see Go-Gurt) and bought by people who don’t have a damn clue where it came from. Mmm. Brains.
My own word-loving brain has never been removed to make pudding, but I do the occasional proofreading and copyediting gig (it turns out spelling is actually really, really important when it comes to donors, sponsors, customers, journalism subjects, and film and theater crews, as well as instructing computers how to do things) and continue to go to adult spelling bees out of genuine enjoyment. The fact that everyone there has gotten some life experience under their belt as well as (hopefully) other experiences that involve the removing of belts, the fact that people can drink, that people have jobs and interesting lives and history and lore to look back on, makes me feel released from every stereotype I’ve ever sensed. I feel like just another born nerd taking her place among the flock. To be confirmed and take communion within the Order of True Nerds is a humbling experience. And it is a community where I no longer live uneasily with the thought:
don’t be scared of me
Years later the friend who had been scared of me would get over the fear and lend me his double album of The Doors. On its cover was the iconic photo of Jim Morrison.
Hey sexy Jim! Replacing a fallen shower curtain? Holding off wild bears? We’ll never know.
My response to the photo was one I experienced countless times throughout my entire youth: a hungry embrace of any image of anything alive, animal, dynamic, willful, unpredictable and unknowable -- no matter how visually or culturally different -- as a representation of myself. I looked at Jim, an out-of-control white boy with great hair and a terrible attitude, and drew from his image the faintest outlines of my future self: my growing consciousness of my very own instincts, my own aversions and angers, thoughts and feelings alien to my family and inherited culture, my ability to give -- or not -- give a fuck. My individual, true, non-monstrous Janani self, at her true Janani dimensions, which were so hard to discover in those early years.
I have mostly outgrown my identifying-with-Jim-Morrison phase, though the thought of risking arrest by exposing myself at a spelling bee is not off the books; Jim’s spirit remains with me. My plan is to do this at a thematically appropriate moment: the next annual Planned Parenthood bee, which I won in 2011 by studying the feminist health book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and correctly cranking out “seminiferous tubules.” My prizes were a plush chlamydia microbe (plush seems to be a theme), a pink figurine of the Statue of Liberty, a lip balm, and tiny vibrator shaped like a bunny. Perhaps you could read this as a completion of a long journey, a validation of all the facets of my being, ALL my identities: the intellectual, the verbal, the sexual, the performative, with a sex toy won through spelling…permission to feel like a full human being at last, as human as anyone else! Jim Morrison, put those muscly arms down (aren’t you tired of holding them up for 40 years?) and take me now, now, NOW!
Sadly, the bunny broke after only one use. A tragedy to which I see only one solution:
Go back and win another one.
