Episode 92: defiant // Tuesday, July 7

Meera: I would lie down at night and there would be that sound of the subway going on at night. And I know that the subway is empty. And I would start imagining that there was somebody who sat next to me who's dead now. Someone who had smiled at me, someone I rubbed shoulders with, or who put their bag on me by mistake, who is no longer alive.

And I just couldn't get that out of my head, like these ghosts on the subway, one by one, just disappearing. And that's what I'm grieving. What every New Yorker, I think, is grieving in some manner, because we have lost so much.

Laura: Today begins a new series on Shelter in Place with the thirteen incredible authors of Fierce, an anthology of essays by and about dauntless women. You’ll hear from all of the authors on this week’s Story Saturday, but my conversations with these riveting women were so wonderful that I’m sharing a few of them in more depth this week.

Today I’d like to introduce you to a celebrated author who wrote the first story in the collection. 

Meera: My name is Meera Nair. I was born in India and I came here to the U.S. in 1997 for grad school, and I'm a writer and an activist, and I'm the author of a book of short stories called Video, published by Pantheon. And I have also written two children's books, which were published in India.

Laura: Meera’s writing has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Guernica, and elsewhere. She’s been awarded fellowships from the New York Times, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Artists’ Colony, and Queens Council for the Arts. Her first book Video won the Asian-American Literary Award, was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and the Editor's Choice at the San Francisco Chronicle. And that’s just the highlight reel.

Over the past few months, Meera has seen COVID-19 change her city dramatically.

Meera: I live in Jackson Heights in Queens, in New York, and it's a neighborhood that has been called the epicenter of the epicenter, the place that had the highest number of deaths in the entire country. 

For days and days all I heard was the wailing of ambulances. I mean, day and night. And I literally would not sleep through the night because I live very close to Elmhurst hospital, which was on the news as one of these hospitals that takes care of immigrants, people who don't have, insurance, and you know, are undocumented. All the suffering of the world, coming together in one locus. 

It's a very interesting neighborhood. It's incredibly diverse. There's these grand old buildings from the 1930s, like the one I live in, which houses these people who are new media or our professors. But it also has a lot of people who are like the backbone of New York. 

Suddenly they started calling them essential workers. until then, you know, they were all vilified,  but , they are the hotel workers and people who drive cabs .  and so it's really interesting mixed neighborhood, but because of the way the pandemic payments came in, a lot of immigrants didn't apply or couldn't get it. And so, these are people who had, Jobs who now don't have a way to make a living and are basically starving.

And so we had these long lines of people.  for 20 blocks, 30 blocks, you saw people just waiting for food and for the food distribution networks. And so we were all contributing to the networks and, you know, doing all the mutual aid stuff and for me, that was the hardest part, watching the city fall apart, watching the city empty out, you know, looking at these pictures of this city that I love so much, I could not live in another place in the world. no other place gives me what New York gives me, but then to see all the roads empty, all that life and vibrancy and color and craziness leached out. 20,000 people , just to think of all these people that are no longer with us. That's really been the worst, just coming to terms with a depleted city.

Laura: This time of sheltering in place has been intense for everyone in New York. But Meera saw the casualties of COVID-19 up close even before the death toll climbed in her city. 

Meera: I work in nonprofit, with the Asian American Federation. And I just love that job. But, you know, it's been a really crazy time for activists. It's been a very, very, busy three months. We do a lot of immigration work. I do a lot of anti-hate work. After COVID happened, there were like a hundred incidents of hate a day against Asians. and so far since March, I think they recorded something like 1800 instances of anti-Asian hate.

It's incredibly depressing--the constant shootings and the killings and the hateful rhetoric that was coming from all quarters.  I feel overwhelmed by the news and what you see and the hatred and the constant attacks against immigrants. 

I'm an immigrant. I came here in 1997 and I became a citizen, so I chose this country. So I have this fierce love for it, which is I don't take it for granted. I chose this. Like, you can't choose your parents, you can choose anything, but I chose a country to live in. So I  felt so betrayed by what is going on. I felt like, who are you? You know, like “who is America? and how could I have been so wrong?” 

And especially for someone like me who works in social justice, you know, it just feels  like “what happened to my country?” It’s that growing realization that there is this strain and this racism and all these things that it's not the shining city on the Hill. 

How do we even begin to heal?  how do we as a country move forward. If we can see each other for who we are and not for  who we want people to be. I wish people would see people for who they are rather than what they look like or where they come from. We have to learn to stop spiraling into some wretched dream of a past and, think “how do we live in this world that we have right now?” 

Why do you keep longing for a world that isn’t there? For a past that never was so great? What is this idea that, “Oh yeah, we were great. And now we want to be great again.” We were never great. We can be great. And so let's do that. Let's work towards that.

I could say that about most countries really, but I wish people would just wake up. I kind of feel like, like at this point, we have been stripped to the bone right now. We have no illusions left. Like there's nowhere to go; there's no dream left — and that's a good thing, because we can now forward and build from rock bottom.

I think George Floyd, was like the ultimate, awakened to reality moment for all of us: we realize there is a cancer and now we can go ahead and heal.

Laura: Meera loves this country--so much that she’s willing to look unflinchingly at the things we need to change. I hope that Meera is right. That maybe we’re finally being stripped down so we can rebuild a more just and equitable country. Maybe this is what we needed all along.

Meera: I'm hopeful , the protests have made me so hopeful. Which is so funny because, you know, I was so afraid to go out, but the moment they started, I was like, “I don't care. I'm putting on my mask!” and I'm out there in the streets and. It was just incredible. The feeling of marching and being with other people and finally seeing, “Oh my God, New York is not dead!” It's there still, these people are all out there protesting, people of every hue and everyone marching and being really happy and it felt,  like community was given back to me. And that was what I was missing so much. Because we live our lives outside. We just like forever  with people. And so I've been going to every single protest that there is like, literally I've been to five protests so far, but mostly in Queens because I'm still afraid to take the subway, but, it's been wonderful. 

Also, my daughter is  19 and she and her friends are out there.  these young people, they're kind of amazing.  Being such warriors.  they're so peaceful and so joyous and so righteous. 

There is such a radical joy of, “Yes, this is America and this is what we do: we protest injustice and we try to take our country back from these people. That has given me a lot of hope at this moment. 

Laura: I’m not surprised to hear that Meera’s daughter is joining the protests. Meera has been modeling advocacy for years. She helps run a reading series in Queens, something she started with two other women, including Nancy Agabian, one of the other writers who contributed to Fierce.

Meera: We run a reading series called Queens Writers Resist, and we've run it for two, three years now. And we encouraged Queens writers to come and read their work.

And we also involve a social justice organization to come in and talk about their work. And we ask people to donate to them.  and then we have a writing prompt and everyone writes in community, and people come up to the mic and share their work. And of course we had to stop everything because of COVID.

Laura: But Meera hasn’t let that stop her. When we talked, Meera was getting ready to host a Zoom reading featuring Black authors in Queens. It was called Say Their Names, and the event raised money for a local nonprofit that helps Black teenagers to become entrepreneurs. 

Meera: I just felt like we needed to do things that were about black joy and black abundance and, black creativity rather than always associate black people with sorrow and killing and things like that. So that's why I'm really happy that we are doing this. 

Laura: Even as Meera is out there protesting and hosting readings to celebrate Black authors and raise money for social justice organizations, she’s also real about how challenging this time has been. Some days just living feels like a fight.

Meera: I fight to retain my dreaming. I fight to be creative, in spite of everything. The only way I can make sense of the world is by writing about it.

It's almost like breathing: the only way  to understand it is this too. Right. So I'm trying to do that even though it's been very, very hard to write. 

Laura: You’ll hear more from Meera this Saturday, but in the meantime I asked her to tell us a little bit about the essay she wrote for Fierce. It’s a book filled with stories of women who fought against injustice. Sometimes they risked their lives in that fight.

A quick trigger warning that Meera mentions self-harm when she talks about the woman she wrote about.

Meera: I wrote an essay called Nangeli: Her Defiant Breasts, and it's about a woman in India, in Kerala, which is the state that my family, my ancestors, my grandparents are from, who is sort of a revolutionary, even though she's in such a low position in the society of the time. They had what was called a breast tax, in that lower caste women in this state were not allowed to cover their breasts. And if they did, a tax would be imposed on them by royal decree. 

So, this story, I came upon it through the BBC or something, and it was so fascinating to me, that first of all, that they imposed such taxes and the fact that she revolted against this tax and basically cut her breasts off in an act of utter defiance, using her own body as a revolutionary instrument. And that so shocked society at that time that it transformed people's minds, and they removed the tax. 

I was so fascinated by this kind of mythic story of this woman, and the more I researched it, I uncovered so many fascinating facts about how it comes from the Rig Veda from our basic traditions, which are  lost in antiquity.

I mean, some of these texts were written, I don't know, 10,000 years ago or something. And those ideas of castes that were sort of set in stone that many centuries and millennia ago are still coming back into our lives and continue to persist. And you know, I sort of started examining my own relationship with caste, my mother's relationship with caste through this story. 

We are upper caste. We lived in this huge old ancestral house. And we always had  farm workers, all these people coming through all the time. And it was always, you know, completely oblivious to the fact that they sat in the veranda: they wouldn't eat with us. They shared separate plates. Until I got  to become a teenager and started questioning everything and getting really angry. About the fact that there was this kind of subtle unspoken differences among people. I mean, not so subtle. people wouldn't even  rock the boat, question, or “why is it that people are treated like this?”

Then I saw how that even worked in the cities that I grew up in:  you know,  India is extremely modern. It has these giant cities. So I felt like I was traveling between  the modern, then the rituals and prejudices of  this traditional older, slower life of the village. 

I also saw congruences between racism against black people in the US, and how we behave in India, against people who are lower caste or people who are of another religion.

So, that made me question a lot, the norms and the rituals that we were seeing around us. Because caste still exists in modern India, and  continues to seep into society in various ways. And things have changed and things have marched, which is what is really interesting. I mean, Kerala itself, which is the state that I'm from and where  the essay’s set, has been ruled by the communist because we have a parliamentary system in India and there are different kinds of governments in different States.

Kerala has had a communist government forever. And so with them, it's like they erase all differences. There is no religion, all this stuff, but even though the government tries to perpetuate all these lofty ideals, still caste has persisted.

And we have a right-wing government that  has been in power now for eight years. And, that has  meant that lower castes have been tortured. You know, the underbelly is exposed just like here in this country where everyone feels, a sense of freedom to say whatever they want and do whatever they want, which would otherwise have been hidden.

And so there has been amazing amounts of acts of violence against the lower class people. And I actually quote in my piece, this horrific act of violence against the lower castes in a village. And that happened in 2016.  I mean, there are cases almost every day in India have some kind of attack against the lower class of, against the delegates. They're called Dalits. So on the one hand,  India is incredibly modern; it's technologically advanced.

It has managed to go COVID and manage COVID better than anything our country has done. Even though they have 1.3 billion people in their country, the state Kerala itself has 35 million people, [and] has so far had only 18 deaths. Yeah. which is, you know, just goes to show that they are incredibly advanced in their thinking and understanding of science, but at the same time, you know, the rest of India has these attacks and this violence against Dalits. And so there's that tension between modernity and tradition that continues to exist in that society. 

So that's what my essay is about: watching all these things and sort of trying to make these connections with my own experiences in the essay. Nangeli decides that she's not going to give in, and she  takes a very radical step. And she uses her own fortitude to achieve that. 

She refuses to be controlled. And in that she owned her own story. And that's the way all of us need to own our own stories and our own selves sort of like by saying, “I'm going to, I do what I have to do, and I'm going to do it kindly and without hurting anyone else.”

Laura: During this time of sheltering in place, Meera has been learning to own her story in a new way.

Meera: I've had a revelation during COVID: I've decided I'm going to publish my novel, which I've sat on for years, because I've had all kinds of psychological issues about it.  but now I've decided, “you know, I didn't die. So I might as well publish my novel.” 

Laura: I asked Meera if she’d tell me a little bit more about this novel she’d been sitting on for years. It’s a story that has a lot in common with the essay she wrote for Fierce.

Meera: The novels set in Kerala, during the 1950s, when a Communist revolution is happening, and it's totally through the eyes of a young girl, who's around 14 and she lives in the house of these upper class people. It's told through her eyes watching this revolution happen as she sort of negotiates this kind of liminal space that she inhabits between being of a lower caste, but living with the upper caste and that shifting power balance.

It's complete, it's finished and it's sitting there but I had some huge psychological issues around the novel that I've not been able to work through. So then during these three months, I've been doing a lot of meditation. I've been doing a lot of work on myself, and I finally decided that, you know what, I am just going to go ahead and publish this novel. It's a crazy time to decide to publish it when the economy's crashed, but I'm going to send it out and see what happens. 

Laura: I told Meera that I was rooting for her and her novel. It’s a crazy time to publish it, but then it’s a crazy time for a lot of things. Like, say, starting a daily podcast during a global pandemic when you’ve got three kids at home and have just lost your family’s source of income.

The daily sanity Meera offers us today is that sometimes in these crazy times, crazy makes a lot of sense. For so much of life we play it safe. But then there are seasons of being stripped down, of hitting rock bottom, of finally understanding that change is needed

Maybe today’s the day we put on our masks and protest, or finally send out that novel we’ve been sitting on, or look for a way to be an advocate to others who have been fighting injustice for a long time. 

Maybe it’s a time to fight against injustice like Nangeli, minus the lost body parts. A time to be inspired by women like Meera. To be defiant and brave and hopeful about what we can become.

Before I go, I want to thank a couple of our newest supporters of Shelter in Place.

Jodi Buyyounouski, the miles I ran by your side when my kids were babies are precious to me. Those were hard years of parenting and life, but your constant encouragement and belief in me kept me going week after week. Your continued friendship and support is one of the best gifts our sport has given me. Thanks for showing me how to be fierce.

Paul Baker, you will forever have my gratitude for spending an entire day helping us build this writing shed, where we’re now creating episodes of Shelter in Place every day. When I asked Nate what he appreciates most about you, he said that you’re one of the most loyal people he’s ever met, that you are a rare, truly creative person--as anyone will immediately understand when they see your work at C-clampstudios.com. 

I’ll include your site in my show notes for today so others can appreciate your work as much as we do.