[NEW NONFICTION] Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

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?

//

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.

//

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?

//

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.

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.

Will the film adaptation of Loung Ung’s FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER do the heavy lifting of the memoir?

(HarperCollins)

BY NICHOLE L. REBER

Regardless of your opinion of the Hollywood celebrity, Angelina Jolie’s latest cinematic offering from the director’s chair might just be worth watching. Netflix will release her cinematic version of Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers on September 17. It is not her first time bringing a book to the silver screen but what makes this film different will hopefully be Jolie’s ability to see the historical lessons Ung’s book inspires. Even moreso, let’s hope the cinematic and/or film version inspires us to see the connections to today’s American climate.

Originally published as a memoir of the Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia, the movie comes to us in the form of a biographical historical thriller. More important than the celebrity behind the camera, however, Americans don’t often hear—much less think— about the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal sweep through Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Few of us remember or even know that they are rumored to have killed up to a quarter of the nation’s population. Seventeen years ago we were reminded of the atrocities when Ung’s memoir hit bookstore shelves. It’s time to check it out again.

At the book’s beginning we learn how America’s bombing of Cambodian borders to destroy neighboring Vietnamese military bases fanned the flames of Cambodia’s civil war, already brewing for decades when the Khmer Rouge deposed the Lon Nol government, which Ung’s father worked for.

Khmer Rouge, an army of impoverished, generally uneducated Cambodians, formed a government called the Angkar, led by Pol Pot, a despot not unlike Uganda’s murderous ruler Idi Amin or China’s Mao Tse Tong. The Angkar executed, starved, and stole from the country’s citizens, forcing them into rural camps, labor camps, and military-training camps. The Angkar purged the country of technology such as radios, televisions, watches, and eight-track players. It denied other indications of social class such as jewelry, education, and money. It spread anti-American, -Vietnamese, and -Chinese propaganda throughout the camps and wrote songs deifying Pol Pot. Ung’s details about those camps in which kids and young adults were forced to see the songs will ripple your skin with goosebumps.

“‘The soldiers walked around the neighborhood, knocking on all the doors, telling people to leave. Those who refused were shot dead right on their doorsteps,’” Ung’s father tells her. Her family, a middle-class Cambodian family with seven children, was forced to leave their home, the capital city of Phnom Penh, and relocated to various types of camps. Instant death would have been imminent if any family members inadvertently revealed anything that bespoke their middle-class status (anathema to this supposedly Communist movement) and connection to the former Lon Nol government.

A reader wouldn’t be hard-pressed to find at least thread connections to the xenophobia, racism, sexism, etc. that has characterized many recent American news reports. The us-versus-them propaganda, the fault-finding in harmless characteristics, the incitement of angry and uneducated masses of the Khmer Rouge People indicate a country in crises. That’s only exacerbated when its people, encouraged to spy and tattle on others, grew suspicious of each other. The mother, for instance, has to live an all-but-mute life in the refugee camp because of her Chinese accent.
An odor of nationalism wafts from the pages of First They Killed My Father. It reminds us that racism isn’t something brought with babies into the world; it’s taught and reinforced by society. That’s why it’s possible for five-year-old Loung to find false security in believing that bad people look one way and good guys look another.

Ung writes: “Many have almond-shaped eyes, thin noses, and light skin, which suggests they might be of Chinese descent. Pure Khmer have curly black hair, flat noses, full lips, and dark chocolate skin.” (In Asian culture noses without bridges are considered inferior and, of course, the darker your skin the more maligned you’ll be.)

The new regime has no law and order and executes helter skelter. “‘The Khmer Rouge are executing people perceived to be a threat against the Angkar,” the father tells his family. “Anyone can be viewed as a threat … monks, doctors, nurses, artists, teachers, students—even people who wear glasses.” Why eyeglasses? Well, as the cliché goes, eyeglasses demonstrate intelligence. As dictators from Pol Pot to Fidel Castro know, an educated population threatens tyrannical rule.

The Khmer Rouge’s genocide came to a close when the Vietnamese, whom Cambodians were brainwashed into thinking were the enemy, entered the country and began rescuing citizens such as the five remaining Ung family members. The Youns (an ethnic slur for Vietnamese) smiled, talked to children, and sometimes patted them on the head, Loung wrote, saying they were not the “devils” she’d been taught they were. They freed their neighbors from the camps and quelled the Khmer Rouge.

It’s a curious thought to see how Jolie will handle the transition from memoir to Netflix Original movie. Until it’s September 17 release, though, you can learn more about Cambodia in the movie The Killing Fields (not to be confused with the Discovery series). To find out more about America’s connection to it, check out Noam Chomsky’s thoughts on the matter and why The Daily Beast claims both sides got Cambodia wrong.

Nichole L. Reber picked up a love for world lit by living in countries around the globe. She’s a nonfiction writer and her award-winning work has been in World Literature Today, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Lunchticket, and elsewhere. Read her stories on a Chinese cult, wearing hijab in India, and getting kidnapped in Peru at http://www.nicholelreber.com/.