archive soup: before there was gay west village there was gay jackson heights, trapped Muslim daughter poetry, Bengali witchcraft, and anti-Western books
january week 4, 2024
Hi friends! How are you doing? I won’t lie, this past week has been kinda hard. But we’re moving through it with love and patience. Today is a rainy day I’m cooking shrimp alfredo pasta as a treat to myself while rewatching Gilmore Girls for the millionth time. If you would like to support me, it would help immensely by sharing, commenting, and becoming a paid subscriber. Thanks!
Reading:
This past week has consisted of me cathertic cries sobbing into my pillow and venting with my friends about the ridiculousness Muslim femmes have to face in our lives. The conversations with my friends went like this:
Me: Hey, how do you practice boundaries with your family and not feel guilty about not always being able to help and support them?
Friend #1: Girl, tell me when you find out.
Friend #2: Hm idk I usually swallow all the stress and die a lil inside everyday
Friend #3: I moved to the other side of the country.
Friend #4: (did not answer)
Feeling defeated and hopeless, I became consumed by it all. I guess there’s just no way out of this, I began to tell myself before going to sleep and then waking up the next day, feeling the heaviness and grief in my body sink into my bed.
I suddenly felt called to reread Bangladeshi queer writer and dear friend of mine, Fariha Róisín’s Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, a book of poems about clawing and praying out of grips of generational trauma on the search for freedom. Freedom.
I read this beautiful book last summer but rereading it now when the grief, resentment, and sadness feel all too raw allowed me to read her poems in such a deeper and transformative way. My copy of the book is filled with bookmarks and dog ears as I have tons of favorite poems. But my favorite poem from the book has to be An Ode to Baby Fa:
“Now, I'm present with myself. It's holy & mysterious & I know that it's alive & I'm patient. I know like the sun, like rain, it spools & I'm pulsing. It's the leaves like the green of pistachio; green like basil— the Earth is green & so are the trees, & in that aliveness of it all, rapturous, rapturous, I am still on this Earth... I am still.
Who sees you when you come into yourself? When you stretch & make space for all the longing, for all the ugly? Who protects you then?
Today is a rainy day. It's a day that has character. A sort of ruinous character, moving. I anger in silence, alone through devasta-tion, while seeking love like a beggar. I am hungry for it, mother. I am hungry for a love that will feed the void you left inside of me. I've been waiting, hiding, in prayer, in the motions, pruning in the gardens of hope, edging closer to an understanding of self. There are so many things that make a self, so many considerations & configurations of being, but I've been trapped in darkness for so long. Its memory is ever present, ever possible, trauma is always on the horizon. It takes rewiring to believe in more, it takes courage to hope.
Tragedy needs examination. No one can ever save you from the turmoil of grief. You have to choose wisely in whom to trust when you're on the floor squirming at injustice. But pain also has its resolution; this too shall pass.
So I celebrate the small grand act of making something big out of a life that coulda turned'a tragedy. No one's sympathy will ever be a salve for the permanent feeling of loss. Whose words will help overcome generations of trauma? You can do it, Fa, you can remember yourself.
This life will pass you by in a blip. No cause or concern, then you're gone. Pain can be hypnotic, find joy in the dance. Choose yourself, especially when no one else will. Find magnificence in solitude. Find God again & again.
But mostly, find celebration. For every day that has tried to kill you ... & failed.”
I felt like my heart was breaking open when I was reading it like Dee Rees words, I am broken / I am open / I am broken open.
Like so many others, Fariha’s writings have saved my life again and again. Like her, I too will find celebration.
Engaging:
I’ve been thinking a lot about Jackson Heights. For readers who are not from New York City, Jackson Heights is a bustling neighborhood full of food, culture, and passion as it is widely known as “Little India”*. Growing up, my family and I would take the F train there. I would watch my aunties and mom moon over the new collection of sarees, my dad and uncles haggling with cashiers over the price of achar jars, while my cousins and I chowed down on chicken lollipops and mango kulfis. I have some of my fondest childhood memories birthed there.
As I’ve gotten older, most of my sweet memories are now rooted in hanging out with my friends in hole-in-the-wall gems (which consist of Nepalese restaurants in the basement of a dodgy cellphone store) venting about politics and the fragmentation of the leftist community.
(*Side note: In the 1980s, Jackson Heights boomed with Indians opening up businesses, naming it “Little India”; Indian jewelry stores; restaurants; and stores selling imported books, magazines, and videotapes. However, despite its name, Indians are a minority among residents of the street as the majority of the demographic of residents is Hispanic. Now, most of the South Asian (second largest majority) community living in Jackson Heights are Bangladeshis and Nepalese.)
I was talking with my dear friends and comrades at Desis Rising Up and Moving office in Jackson Heights for a Queer Caucus meeting. We were talking about what it meant for us to be meeting there to discuss what it meant to be queer in a neighborhood that is associated with our parents and the surveillance of aunties/uncles. While it felt like a juxtaposition, it felt like a powerful one.
When looking at the documentation of the rich queer history, even going back before the AIDs epidemic, white queers in the West have dominated the queer American narrative, becoming the face of the movement. But the truth is, before there was the queer scene and activism in Manhattan (particularly West Village or Greenwich Village), there was Jackson Heights.
When Jackson Heights was first developed in the early 1900s, it was created with the vision of “a planned community”. Which is another term for a closed community for white Americans only. After Manhattan and Brooklyn became largely “urbanized” (another term for working-class Black and brown people. So interesting how jargon is really just code for defacto segregation.), Queens was to be developed as a network of townships and hamlets surrounded by open land. According to Cityscape, Racially and Ethnically Diverse Urban Neighborhoods (1998), “MacDougall maintained considerable control over the creation of what he envisioned as a distinct and unified community inspired, in part, by the low-density, garden city model of British planner Ebenezer Howard.” The garden city model was to emphasize light, space, and greenery. In other words, Jackson Heights was envisioned as an exclusive suburb for a “native” White middle-class family seeking to escape the increasingly culturally diverse city. Upheld by racist housing policies, early developers were able to advertise Jackson Heights as a“restricted residential community”, barring Jews and Black folks.
However, in the 1930s Jackson Heights grew rapidly due to the Roaring Twenties and the Harlem Renaissance. During this time, vaudevillians (a performer, usually in theater, night clubs, etc.), most of which were queer and trans (the majority being Hispanic and Latinx), that worked in theater around Times Square in Manhattan, began to move into the apartments of Jackson Heights. Eventually, Jackson Heights developed into an underground “gay haven” with little public attention amidst the racist housing policies and intolerance towards ethnic/racial minorities in the neighborhoods. According to a New York Times article in 1994, JACKSON HEIGHTS/WOODSIDE; In a Gay Haven, a Sense of Community Builds,
“Jackson Heights has been a gay mecca since the 1920's when the quick subway ride to Times Square drew vaudevillians here.
It is a counterpoint to the Village or Chelsea, where the gay population of white, middle-class men share common histories. Jackson Heights's gay white and Hispanic populations may occupy the same blocks, but they are divided by age, education, heritage and class.
Jackson Heights had its birth as a gay Hispanic haven in the early 1970's, said Mr. Dromm, who said he began visiting its gay bars in 1973. Already, Latin music was being played. But he said it was a wave of immigration in 1981 that turned the gay Hispanic culture into the dominant one.
Edwin Cruz, 28, said he felt more accepted here than in the city's other gay quarters. "In Chelsea," he said last week during Momentum's lunch at St. Mark's, "they have attitudes, and they won't even look at you."
MacDougall’s harsh policies were maintained (Black and brown folks still moved in but were mostly allowed in the smaller complexes) until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Later, after the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965, it paved the way for the massive surge of South Asian immigrants emerging in the 1970s, soon forming the nickname of Jackson Heights, Little India. While South Asian bachelors had started to settle in Jackson Heights (then moving their families or building one), Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights was still very much alive as an underground community + subculture for queer and trans Black and brown folks and was home to gay bars for immigrant men. It became the largest Latinx gay community after San Francisco and Miami.
Things changed in the 1990s when Julio Rivera, a gay Puerto Rican man was brutally killed by three skinheads. Rivera’s murder mobilized queer activism in forming community groups and inspired to creation of the Queens Pride Parade which has been hosted annually ever since. It also became the first gay hate crime to be tried in New York State.
As more South Asians started settling in Jackson Heights in the late 90s and early 2000s, the queer and trans Latinx community became a strong influence on young South Asian queers. Alongside emerged an underground South Asian queer community like DJ Rehka’s, Bhangra Basement, and South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association.
Most of the queer and trans community members have passed away from the AIDS epidemic, or have been pushed out due to the increasing gentrification. But a small group of elders continues to organize.
As I walk through the streets of Jackson Heights with my parents, it’s hard to envision the queer history of these roads as it’s bustling with uncles coming out of the mosque for their daily prayers or aunties grocery shopping. But I am reminded that throughout history, queerness has always been intertwined with the cultural immigrant struggle in New York City’s working-class communities. It is so important to know the roots of our neighborhoods! Research, research, and as always, research.
Listening + Watching:
On the dedication page of Fariha’s Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, she writes:
“In rememberance of Mahasweta Devi, “ I’m being condemned as a witch.”
As you know as per my last Weekly Roundup, I talk about my obsessions with the villainization of witches. When I read, I just had to learn more about this woman. I went down a rabbit hole trying to consume every interview, article, and abstract paper I could find on this magical woman.
Mahasweta Devi was a Bengali activist and writer who dedicated her life to fighting for the lives of the oppressed, specifically communists, Dalits, Indigenous communities, and sex workers. What an incredible woman!!
Obsessed:
When I want to find new books to read, I go to my favorite and trusted Tiktok account, @mah1let! Mahi makes Tiktoks of what books to read and I always find beautiful gems from her. I really appreciate that she posts about books written by women and how she looks for publishers or editions that platforms writers from the global south. Check Mahi out! Obsessed!!
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Loving:
I’ve been loving this picture of Audre Lorde I found. During this dreary week, seeing this image of Lorde looking so free and full of joy has filled me with so much ease. Here’s to joy and pleasure!
That’s all! What have you been reading, engaging, listening/watching, obsessed with, and loving lately? Do tell and comment below <3
It makes me so SO happy whenever I find another community organizer who also writes. Beautiful round-up and I’m glad I stumbled upon your newsletter 💛
I love you friend, honored to be witnessed by you.