Crabby postcolonial reading list and cribsheet: Gotham edition

When I say “postcolonial,” I’m talking about the internal state of mind and being after you’ve started decolonizing yourself.

After you’ve started dismantling the inherited ambient ideologies and started kicking out some of the stuff that’s not yours, and embracing that stuff that’s yours to embrace.

It is political, yes. But at the level of the personal, rather than national or global.

I’m not a postcolonial theorist or academician. I know that the term has import that I’m not addressing here. These are one idiosyncratic brown female human’s findings in the course of making sense of her world.

It’s not intended just for women, or people of color, or those who trace their history to some colonized nation. If you grew up in today’s world, you probably got indoctrinated too (no matter how you identify) into believing yourself to be smaller than you really are, and you are welcome to this discussion.

This is Part 1 of an irregular series about books, places, media, and bad-asses who taught me something I sorely needed. Things that helped heal and integrate some excluded part of me.

Today’s homage is to New York City.

Yes, again.

You might have picked up that I’m just the teensiest bit married to this place. Or at least shacked up with it, common-law style. (It may be that my relationship to the city is changing, and will assume some new form soonish. But more on that later.)

Right now, I want to talk about how transformative and healing it can be to live in and love a place that loves you back.

So, so many gifts I’ve gotten from living here.

The single biggest one was the feeling of blending in.

About the place I grew up, I will just say that I most definitely did NOT blend. Have you ever heard the expression “fly in the buttermilk?”

Yes. Well.

It sucked.

It’s also probably why I’m doing this right now, obsessed with the stuff I’m obsessed with.

Growing up in an environment where I didn’t fit the norm was difficult and formative. I got so totally used to being different that I didn’t know any other way of being.

I was maybe even a bit defensive in my differentness — I wore it like a giant badge, daring someone to point it out.

The first experience I remember of walking down a street and having no one pay me any attention was when I was new to NYC.

This place is lousy with every kind of human.

I got to blend in and just be part of the mass of humanity — something I had never experienced in my hometown, and didn’t even know was possible for me.

How can I explain the deliciousness? I was anonymous. I didn’t stick out. No one knew who I was, or eyed me strangely to see what language would come out when I opened my mouth. Bank tellers and checkout girls treated me with equal-opportunity indifference, which they lavish fairly upon one and all.

In New York City, I got to feel Not Odd for the very first time.

It’s possible here, encouraged even, to let your freak flag fly. And once you do, you realize that it’s not even that freakish, because within a square mile there are at least twenty-eleven people who are weirder than you.

And the men of this town?

God bless New York City, is all I have to say.

I’ve gotten used to a certain brashness. Men here mostly don’t play. If they like you, you know it.

This was a gift too. Would you believe that Growing Up Different had me convinced that I wasn’t cute? (Yes, I know. It makes me feel sad for that teenager who had so little sense of what she was.)

Well honey, let me tell you: being suddenly seen as attractive can be quite diverting, and can undo a lot of that early feeling of being as appealing as chopped liver.

(As Joy Behar says so wisely: Don’t knock objectification. There will come a time when no one objectifies you, and you’re going to miss it.)

The nugget I extract from all this newyorkiness

I was extremely fortunate to land in a place that suited me and was the vessel for experiences that helped me untangle some of the threads that got tangled up earlier into a big ball of nonsense.

I wish this for everyone: that we all find a home that makes all the parts of us feel welcome and wanted, that serves as a support and a stage where we can daily bring ourselves into being.

A home that loves us back.

Comment Fu

I confess it makes my teeth itch to press publish and put this personal stuff out there in front of God and everybody. I’m doing it because I know I’m not the only one.

I’m interested to hear what this makes you think of. If it raises questions. Or if there’s a place that you came home to that loved you in just the way you needed.

This space is like a Quaker meeting that is happening in my living room. Honored guests, please speak as you are moved to. And let’s be awesome to each other, because graciousness among friends is why we hang out together.