[NEW NONFICTION] Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

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Fleabag was, without question, a 2019 hit. Hollywood affirmed the societal value of Fleabag this fall, offering writer, director, and main actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge widespread recognition for her work, winning three Emmy awards in 2019, and two Golden Globe awards.

Set in London, Fleabag reckons with the everyday struggles of a white, English, cis-gendered British woman. People of color don’t really figure into her storyline (except for one sexual encounter, in the second season). The show, though aware of whiteness, doesn’t seem interested in contextualizing Fleabag’s life within the grand scheme that produces her material conditions. Despite this, I still loved the show.

The highlight of Fleabag is not Fleabag herself (I know too many like her– troubled white feminists who daily confront the contradictions of their privilege and oppression), but the show’s narration. Waller-Bridge’s direction cultivates an intimate relationship between the viewer and Fleabag, created by moments when she looks directly into the camera. Through the screen, the viewer has access to the character’s self-reported motivations and thoughts. It’s those moments where she is the most tender, cruel, and honest. What’s interesting is that these connections are established by the visual—they begin when Fleabag makes eye contact with us.

Perhaps more enchanting than these moments was the split second when someone else – the (Hot) Priest – noticed the eye contact was happening. (Hot) Priest’s intrusion into Waller-Bridger’s narration is like watching someone enter the mind of the maker. (Hot) Priest, played by Andrew Scott, is tumbling into the understanding produced by the poet and a clear-eared listener. It is this thing which makes art powerful: the negotiated space between two people trying to understand the thing between them, and by extension, one another. This is what makes (Hot) Priest hot: he wants to build this space with Fleabag. He already sees her. He wants to know her.

These past six months, I’ve been so happy on my own, and yet, even at the heights of my solitude, I wonder: what does it mean to be seen? How does it feel to be known? And perhaps most terrifyingly: are such requests impossible?

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Seeing and knowing are irrevocably linked for me. This idea I’m engrossed with–being understood—recognizes that our methods of communication are not always useful in sharing the totality of our sentiments. As John Berger says in Ways of Seeing, “Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Language, and the intangible and inaccessible images produced by language, allow me a way into recognition. But it is not plain language.

Language is not built for the lives we lead. Though I call my good friends often from the other side of the earth, there’s a part of my life they’re missing by not physically seeing me. Kelsey doesn’t see the way the angles of my face soften when I talk about a new crush. Mia doesn’t see how the new Maggie Rogers song makes my eyes well as I think about that last person I loved. Irene isn’t here to touch my forehead when I think I have a fever. Our texts don’t suffice. They do not make me recognizable.

Earlier this summer, I was traveling around Europe with a childhood friend. The last city we went to was Rome. I was at Palazzo Barberini, which houses the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica or Italy’s National Gallery of Ancient Art.

It plays host to many famous paintings, but perhaps the most singular is La Fornarina (the Baker), a portrait by Raphael.  The figure is believed to have been Raphael’s lover, Margarita Luti. She appears in other paintings by Raphael, but it is this painting that draws out the rapture in me. I am particularly interested in the way Raphael uses translucent cloth to suggest Margarita’s agency in exposing herself. A classic subject of the period is the naked body. Raphael shows this form in La Fornarina, but covers her in cloth. Thus, she is clothed and naked, visible and opaque, at the same time.

The fabric is a delicate muslin, made popular during the Mughal Dynasty in South Asia. This particular weave is the product of weavers in Dhaka, in Bengal. It’s where my grandmother was from. So hands like hers, brown hands, delicate hands, made the medium necessary for this moment of intimacy. These hands remain invisible, translucent, just like the fabric they created. They are unseen in La Fornarina, and so they can’t be known, either.

In the painting, the subject is seemingly trying (and failing) to shield her body, not unlike Fleabag. She, too, makes eye contact with us. But she is unlike so many of the female nudes of the era, drawing the anonymous viewer in. Implicit in her language is her lover. Raphael’s relationship with his subject is not unlike (Hot) Priest’s. His painting suggests that he is peering in on this subject, a woman who attempts to remain hidden, yet still desires to be perceived.

But the perspective of narration is different. In Waller-Bridge’s show, Fleabag unfurls her own story. Raphael, instead, shows us his mistress. His painting then is less about the viewer seeing him as it is about the viewer seeing what he sees. Implied in the image of his lover is his act of looking at and perceiving her. Or, as Berger says, his painting is interested in the act of recognizing her. He wants to share this moment of visual intimacy with us. He wants to create a moment of shared seeing.

Sight, then, also reveals our connections to one another. And in the case of this painting, with the missing brown and Black hands that created its moment, it also reveals the ways we erase one another.

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Consider the Netflix series Sense8. The show follows the lives of 8 people who have a gene that allows them to experience one another’s senses and emotions in real-time. In the show, Kala, a darker-skinned, curly-haired, desi woman falls in love with the German Wolfgang. They fall for each other because they see each other—literally, but also emotionally.

In order to communicate their shared feelings, the directing Wachowski sisters decide to show us that they can see what one another sees. When Kala is in Mumbai, Wolfgang is with her. They are not just sharing their emotions, then. They are sharing their connection with the world.

But we might wonder—what would happen if this connection were not forged in their biology? Would Wolfgang’s seeing of Kala’s body and life lead to him knowing and understanding her? The Wachowskis picked actors of different races, languages, and religions for their show. Could Kala and Wolfgang’s true connection have existed in Waller-Bridge’s world or in our world? Or is it only in a work of fantasy that someone like Kala could be understood by someone like Wolfgang, someone white?

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As a child, when people asked what I wanted to be when I was older, I used to say: I want to be free. Buried inside that statement was something deeper: I wanted to be understood.

These days, many of my closest friendships are with other writers. None of us have perfect vision. Every person I have ever felt romantic affection for, though, has had perfect vision. But even when I showed them my body, they couldn’t see me enough to create that special space of sight, of seeing and being seen. I have wanted to make that space with them, that space shared by Fleabag and (Hot) Priest, by Kala and Wolfgang, by Margarita and Raphael.

They read my work with dedication. My writing is Fleabag’s voiceover, Raphael’s painting. I’m looking for the reader who can see me through the page, who is fighting to make this space with me. Because they do have to fight. There’s much crowding the space where the reader might be able to recognize me.

As a writer, I am in the business of sharing my business. I use my work – poetry, prose, fiction – to communicate essential qualities I see in people and the world. I’m trying to show the reader what I find beautiful about living. These are moments of recognition, and thus, intense intimacy. My writing is about fleshing out the seconds where I am tender with the world. So they reveal me, too.

I’m not trying to make myself hard to understand. When I write a story with complex allusions, I want people to get it. I want them to understand the delicate environment I’ve created with language in order to communicate a more nuanced and delicate thought. My work is a part of a larger project of being understood. It’s about giving the reader enough information so that they can walk through the haze and find me, understand me. One of my biggest fears, then, exists on the opposite end of knowledge and made its way into music a long time ago. As Nina Simone ached on my father’s old record player, Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Perhaps the irony here is that life seems to insist time and time again that we are most understood by those who “see” us. But in my experience, seeing my body alone has not rendered me known. My last partner saw me but she did not understand me. I thought she did until I realized, she couldn’t. I wasn’t like her – she who has gay grandmothers – I was always going to have to fight to be seen. Some days, she doesn’t have to fight. Seeing, then, is not directly knowing for people like me. There is work that the see-er has to put in to reach that thing we call comprehension.

Fleabag doesn’t share herself, ultimately, with Hot Priest. She shares with the viewer to avoid being seen by real people. She knows the cost of being misunderstood, as exemplified by those jarring interactions with her family members. But for me, for my friends, it’s different. When I look at Raphael’s painting, I see a subject. I choose to engage in the painting’s constructed moment of intimacy.

There’s a privilege there, in Fleabag’s ability to shift back to the language of recognition with (Hot) Priest when she is ready. I don’t have that space in my life. I can’t help but think of the white person who met me a few months ago, trying to embody all that I was in a few words. Their choices? Indian, Woman, Immigrant. But they would never be reduced down to words. No one would attempt to make a whole person into a series of adjectives.

When I refuse to be seen, it is not an act of defiance. I am giving in. There’s an inertia at work in the way that I am seen and perceived. The inertia tends towards disinterest, erasure, or stereotypes. I have spent my life desperately trying to explain myself through the web of misunderstanding that exists where Fleabag finds love. It’s exhausting.

Unlike Fleabag, I don’t fear being seen. I demand it. I demand you find it in yourself, dear reader, to fight for this moment with me. I need you to see me for who I am. I need you to assist me in undoing the objecthood that I am otherwise left to drown in.

These days, I feel most seen and understood by my friends. Not because they look at me and see a familiar story, but because they have perceived the words of my stories. They take time to tread through the haze created by a world that insists on my objecthood. They had to walk through the haze of “unseeing” made by ignorance, the very haze I was able to escape through books and movies as a child. It wasn’t literally “seeing” other people that helped me forge bonds with them, just as so many saw Fleabag, so many saw Margarita, and so many see me. I was made into an object by the enforcement of a different kind of seeing, making me into a thing to be seen, instead of a person to be recognized.

It is using art as a way of seeing that allows us to understand one another. In his book, John Berger says that “to be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself…Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.”  I remember painting my own body in a painting class last year. How much I loved my legs. But I could only paint when I was alone. When it was just me and the force of my mind’s eye. My writing removes the pedestal, the slick glory of linseed oil and mohair. I wish to be before you, without disguise. I wish my writing, if not myself, to achieve the velocity of escape from the soul’s nudity, from display. Seeing through my writing is my way of rewriting, of revealing myself. It is the way of seeing me that takes precedence over all else. This is the seeing I cherish. And there is a beauty to it that exceeds all description, and thus, all language.

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ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE is an undergraduate at Yale where she majors in Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, the Indiana Review Online, Paper Darts, and Broad Recognition, among other places. Ananya’s work is mostly concerned with love, liberation, and certainty. You can find her early in the mornings watering her plants or listening to love songs.