Resisting (Resistance) Stories

Hesitancy of Engagement ³

Bryant: I am not ready to tell this story. It is a story that resists its own telling because it might reveal too much to me, and about me. I am afraid of what you might come to know about me as a man, as Black man, as a Black gay man trying to find the origins of his being in his father. Maybe it is not that the story resists it’s telling. Maybe it is that the telling of the story is an act of resistance; a story with tension and pull; a story that is tensive ⁴ —that will hold me in a perpetual relationship to my father; a story that screams against its continued silence; between whether it will be told right, and the truths and untruths of my narrative authority to tell; between the realities of who I am, and who my father was—at least now in my memory of him.

Claudio: Do I have yet the courage? To go further . . . to explore the impossible pain of finding the origins of myself in the Father? Yes, my story resists its telling even when it is already being told; my history is an act of resistance . . . negating the vacuum. Tensive—a push and pull—part of my life, attributes of a social structure . . . I like it but not to maintain . . . yet to transform . . . am I too naïve here? Am I able to escape blood, biology, and history? White, straight, male, Father of two, and son of (no) one. This is me. I am not like that Man, am I? I am no Man . . . and that’s not a bad place to be. I am a son of Father. Father was a son of Grandma. I never wrote about Mother and memory is all I have. I am Father of two. A push and a pull.

Hari: Every time I use my name I live in tension between courage and cowardice in my attempts at presencing multiple identities from absences and silences, from ruptures, from my treasonous breaks against blood and tradition, from the silent presence of my father’s sorrow in the gap where I legally tore off my name from his. The stories I have deliberately constructed to justify my brown and bearded presence, here in space and time on this side of an ocean and two continents away from my father, stand tensely silent when confronted by the raging everyday storm of parenting across religions and races, borders and languages, masculinities and feminisms. Do I have the courage? It does not matter whether I do—my infant daughter’s interracial skin already marks her for a betweener-life of resisting stories. ⁵ Her unspoken future questions thunder in my ears now, here, pushing and pulling me with/against my father as I seek to perform and transform the material spaces where I live and labor. ⁶

Anatomy of Desire and Disdain

Bryant: My memories of my father are clear and present, yet at the same time fuzzy and fleeting—in that way in which my body is evidence of his being; the increasing familiarity when I look at old photos, when I look in the mirror seeing the him that I am becoming staring back at me—texture of hair, slop of forehead, shape of eyes, angle of nose, curl of lip, and even a smile, when he smiled. The tilt of head, turn of a gesture, the way of movement, of sway and shift and strut that I used to laugh at, has somehow found its way into the lexicon of my body gesture. And that way in which things coming out of my mouth remind me of things that he would say that I promised myself I would never say. Saying things that speak him into being again through me, as me, as him—being copresent, again.

Yet memory and remembrance become confused reflections and refractions of a truth, a truth that lies somewhere in a collective or individual history or maybe residing resolutely in the body; maybe the truth like complicity is in the blood, and in the end, will blood tell? I am not sure where to begin to tell this story, or maybe it has already begun. So let me go there. “Go there,” in that way that people say, “Don’t go there!”—as a proclamation against telling, a resistance to a particular knowing, “there” as a space of danger or a potential conversation not yet ready to be had. But I need to go there to retrieve parts of this memory and parts of myself. I need to go there to deliberately reconstruct, “here in space and time,” the meaning of those experiences that have forever shaped a particular image of myself.

I remember when I was about twelve years old, the fourth boy of five living boys, my mother sent me into her bedroom to retrieve a brush from her drawer. I remember walking into the bedroom and seeing my father lying drunk on the bed. It was a familiar sight—body splayed open, eyes half opened, and an exhausted labored breathing with intermittent snoring that called attention to a lack of coherence. But this time, for some reason, my father’s pants were open and his penis was hanging out of the fly of loose boxer shorts, a recalcitrant digit that had fathered seven children, had fathered me. I remember being fixated. I wasn’t fixated on my father’s penis as in sexualizing my father ⁷ as much as I was fixated on his heterosex and the instrument of that union between penis and vagina, between blood and semen that created new blood ⁸ and the ways in which my own penis would probably not perform that same feat. I knew then and he knew it. That moment was a confrontation with a reality and consequence. You see my father knew me from a young age. Somehow he knew that I was gay and unlike the current politics of telling “coming out stories,” I don’t have a story like that to tell, some heroic narrative of strife and transcendence as some pseudotherapeutic psychology of overcoming a cloistered identity from child to parent contributing to a public politic of outing. Only to say that my father spent a lot of time trying to discipline me out of gayness and into masculinity, as if the two were resistant opposites—wanting to rough me up, wanting me not to be so sensitive, wanting me to want girls like my slightly older brother who was almost hyper-heterosexual at only two years older than me. My father promoted that activity and elevated my brother as a boyhood masculine ideal on which I should code. He showed me many models of the expected. And somehow that moment of seeing his penis was one of those models.

I also remember (and I am not sure if this is a separate story but they are all connected in memory, and from the place of my current telling) my mother telling a conflicted narrative to her boys. When I was about sixteen, speaking to my slightly older brother with me present she said, “If you’re going to have sex, wearing a condom would be smart.” Long before the construction of “safe sex” my mother, the mother of seven and a nurse’s aid was signaling the prevention of pregnancy and the transmittal of disease. The story was conflicted not in her telling, but in my head and the ways in which memories compete for primacy or strive towards some fidelity with other stories told in time and place. Because you see, I also remember my mother telling me (maybe inappropriately) that my father refused to were condoms; hence, after deciding to no longer have any more children and before menopause, she was perpetually on birth control pills. When my mother told that story, I remembered a time when I saw what appeared to be a condom in my father’s wallet, which I later confirmed. I wondered why my dad would have had a condom in his wallet if he refused to were a condom with my mother. So when my mother was telling me this story that my father would not wear condoms, and her strong lesson to my brother and I about wearing condoms, there was a conflation of who my father was and who she wanted her boys to be. (This is me. I am not like that Man, am I?) Anatomy is not destiny. ⁹

The image of my father’s penis became symbolic for me, it was not a fantasy—but maybe a farce; it was about sex and sexuality, it was about progeny and protection, and maybe about infidelity and a filial connection to knowing myself in relation to my father’s penis; a penis as a point of origin for a son to know his father; penis to penis as a discontinued umbilical cord that would, if allowed, transmit not only blood or semen but a kind of habitus, “a set of historical relations ‘deposited’ within individual bodies in the form of mental and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation and action”—culture and the complicities of conceit (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 16).

My own penis, sometimes a recalcitrant digit most often encased within a condom at the point of penetration, has engaged in a particular betrayal of expected masculine performances—at least in my father’s terms (Kumar, 2010a) or maybe my penis has engaged in a resistance to recreating the performances of my father:

a resistance to fathering,

a resistance to the assumed acceptable directionality of my desire,

a resistance to the transmittal of disease as one site of control,

and to the definition of my character—in some mirror image of a father in his son.

[At the time of writing this section of the essay, I heard from a television in the distance, a few lines from the movie “How Do You Know?” which was being advertised. A primary character played by Owen Wilson asks another man: “How do you know when you’re in love?” The answer, “When you choose to wear a condom with the other women that you sleep with.” This is not completely suggestive of my father’s thoughts or actions, but the simultaneity of hearing and writing caused me further pause.]

I know that I am not a clone of my father; the union of my father and mother made new blood, a conception of culture with the emergence of this new possibility. ¹⁰ I am a “betweener.” I know that I am not an exact replication of either. My father’s penis was a tool of production not exclusively a tool for a reproduction of himself through my mother. And maybe that was my mother’s performance of resistance, the biological performance of resistance by all women that tempers as it creates new life. Now, in the absence of both my father and my mother, I stand in the gap of their former presence—bridging the reality of their once being in memory with only skin, story, and blood to evidence their existence.

Claudio: The gap we write from . . . What I thought I was going to write and what I am writing. It is just the three of us and fathers . . . between and among B&H . . . lives/families/communities intertwined in memories of men.

I have blocks of memories from the man I called father. I remember a period from an earlier age in my childhood where I really want to please father in the hope he would pay attention to me and may stay . . . close. I remember a short period of my life where I was frustrated with his actions . . . where I tried to understand him and never could. I remember a period in my late teens when I wanted to forgive father when he was away (often) and not being able to when he was around (not often). I remember a period when I was the drunk man, with “a fuck it” and “care nothing about life” attitude, and still I could not get close to father or care about him. I remember a period when I wished to forgive father and doing so to forgive myself. I remember a period when after had I stopped drinking I could not stand the sight of him. I remember being a father myself not knowing if I wanted to let my father play grandpa with Analua.

Bryant’s words haunt me: “I know that I am not a clone of my father; the union of my father and mother made new blood, a conception of culture with the emergence of this new possibility.”

I am not that man—am I? And yet, at least a part of me wishes to forgive, and another does not. My scars are raw.

I’m always scared of becoming that man.

I remember: 2004. I enter the back porch of my house in Champaign, IL. I can hear Dani laughing on the phone. She’s speaking Portuguese and looking at me she says: “Claudio just arrived. I will pass the phone to him. Just a moment, please.” With her hand on the speaker Dani tells me: “It’s your father, he called three times already . . . please talk to him.” In all these years in the United States, my father never called, not once. I am worried, but Dani was laughing so it cannot be bad news. Father was clearly charming her. Still, my hands are tense while taking the phone from her and lighting a cigarette at the same time.

“Hey, it is me. Is everything okay?” I say.

“No, it is not,” says the voice from the other side of the line.

“It is not working anymore,” continues the voice. I can tell by the voice that my father is drunk.

Already without patience: “What is not working? You’re not making any sense.”

“What? What is not working? My dick is not working. It is flat dead!” Father answers.

After all these years, he called for the first time, not once but three times to tell me that his penis cannot get hard.

“It is good. You cannot father any more children . . . actually it is great news,” I say.

“I love all my children,” father responds.

“How many do you have?” I say full of irony.

“I may not have been a good father but I love all my children, it is not all my fault.” He keeps talking.

Silence, which is all I give him. I do not say a word. He keeps talking . . . silently I hang up the phone. I put my smoke in the ashtray and enter the kitchen. Dani comes to me and ask:

“What does your dad want?”

“Nothing, just talk I guess.” Dani can tell I am mad.

“Claudio, you should make an effort to get in good terms with your dad.”

“Someday.” I answer and I then scream to the rest of the house: “Children, Daddy is here!” And I can hear Francisco and Analua running towards me.

Hari: I shout, “Daddy is here! Daddy is here!” as I run through the corridor of our cramped apartment toward the door. Except I’m shouting in Tamil, “Appa vandhutta! Appa vandhutta!” as I run past the narrow entryway to the kitchen, where my mother is preparing dinner. I’ve been reading in the small room I share with my sister, but my ears have been leaning toward the window, which overlooks the passageway next to our building. My father always jangles his keys as he walks, and I listen for the unique pattern—jing-jangle, jing-jangle—that signals to me his impending arrival. When I hear it I always run to the door, but then I stop and listen for his keys coming up the stairs to our second-floor apartment. Just when the jingling stops, when I know he’s about to put the door key into the lock, I throw open the door and yell “Appa!” at my father. This is a daily ritual, every evening on weekdays, or whenever I hear my father coming home, for the few formative childhood years that we live in that cramped apartment in Yemen while my father worked at a factory on the outskirts of town. Later, when we moved to another apartment building, the geography changes such that my father’s route to the front door becomes both invisible and inaudible—I can no longer hear my father’s keys. And now, separated from my father both by immense physical distance and by my own willful breaking of relationships with my family, Claudio’s words bring me right back to those embodied moments—my body tilts to the left, my ears strain toward a nonexistent window listening for my father’s arrival, my nose twitches with the expected smell ¹¹ of sweat and factory machinery on my father’s clothes.

My father comes home and immediately changes into more comfortable clothes. He sheds his trousers and wraps a lungi around his waist. He walks around the apartment shirtless, in his sleeveless white undershirt. As a boy, I am scrawny and sickly, wearing large glasses behind which my eyes constantly swim toward my father’s large and robust torso as he tries to unwind from the day. The family sits down for dinner at the table, and my father starts eating while my sister and I are still placing food on our plates. He eats quickly and loudly, both aspects of deep annoyance for my mother who chides him as she often does at mealtime. While my sister and I chatter away, my father never talks during meals. Before I have even begun mixing my rice and sambar, he finishes and gets up from the table, belching as he walks to the bathroom to wash up. A short while later, he walks back into our cramped living/dining room and switches on the TV to watch a movie. I glance at him knowing that he’s not really watching the screen, that his mind is elsewhere. After a while he sees me looking at him, and he smiles briefly, absently, before his gaze shifts away once again. I want to say something, to ask something, but the moment passes in silence.

My eyes wander toward his torso, toward the faded white string that crosses his chest from his left shoulder down to his right hip and then back again behind his back to form a loop, visible on the brown skin of his chest momentarily until it slips beneath the white fabric of his undershirt. The string is a thicker version of the string I wear too, except that on my skinny body the string hangs loosely, well below my waist and often slipping right off my shoulder. I unconsciously reach up with my hand to slip it back onto my bony shoulder blades. The string is called a poonal, and it marks our two male bodies as Hindu Brahmins, members of the highest caste in Hinduism. The string is composed of three single threads that are tied together in a knot to form a continuous loop. The three threads are supposed to symbolize the three major deities in the Hindu pantheon—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. At least, that’s what I’ve been told they symbolize; they might symbolize a variety of other significant aspects of Hinduism that I never find out. I know that a Brahmin boy can only wear the string after a ceremony when the boy is old enough—again, memory beguiles me as I cannot remember what the “right” age is for the ceremony. I do not remember exactly how old I was, but it must have been sometime between when I was 11 or when I was 13. I do remember, vividly, the tension around the ceremony because while my father is a Brahmin my mother is not. I remember embodied moments of tilt and sway, gesture and smell, how incense and smoke fills my eyes and nose, and how my grandfather, my father’s father, leans in to whisper into my ear at the end of the ceremony: “You are a Brahmin now, although your mother is a Nair.” He says this in English, and I have to strain to hear his wheezing above the noise of the Brahmin priests, men chanting Sanskrit slogans at my father and me, re-citing my patriarchal privilege. The string that my father wears is a double string composed of two separate strings that each has three threads. The double string marks my father’s body as a married Brahmin man. A Brahmin marriage ceremony involves several rituals, one of which has the Brahmin man exchanging his single string for a double string.

Again the embodied tension—my parents were married in a Brahmin ceremony with my father’s side of the family profoundly displeased at the sullying presence of my mother’s non-Brahmin body in a sacred Brahmin space. Or so my parents told me during my childhood. By the time I am old enough to ask, relations between the two sides have moved on, and past tensions are simply unspoken, simmering in the embodied tensiveness of differences in class and language, in desire and religion, sustaining my life blood in between their push and pull.

Sitting at the dinner table in our little apartment in Yemen, thousands of miles away from those geographical spaces where these strings matter, my father and I sit quietly as brown bodies living in an Islamic country where anti-Hindu religious tensions are running high. Kashmir has erupted in violence again, caught between avowedly Islamic Pakistan and allegedly secular but Hindu-dominated India. Sentiments on the streets around our apartment are vigorously pro-Pakistani, expressing profound displeasure at the sullying presence of our Hindu bodies in Islamic Yemeni public space. Sentiments are childishly anti-Indian on the playgrounds of my school, an elite private school owned by the same families that own the factory where my father works. Sitting at the dinner table, I want to ask my father about the boys at school who chant in Arabic at me, chanting that my father works for their fathers, taunting me that we stinking Indians are their stinking servants. I start to say something, but I am probably mumbling—he doesn’t hear me. I start again, and my father suddenly turns around, looks at me and grunts abruptly, “Huh?” His loud voice fills the space between us, and I know he was lost in thought, that he simply hadn’t heard what I said, that this is his way of simply asking me what it was I had asked, but the abrupt sound rocks me back as it usually does. “Nothing,” I mumble, and go back to picking at my plate. The tensions in our lives remain simply unspoken.

In the years that have since passed, my parents and I have moved into and out of many apartments, through different geographical and cultural spaces. Somewhere in time I find myself many more thousands of miles away from Yemen and India, again as a brown body in an unfamiliar space profoundly shaped by pleasure and displeasure. However, I don’t have a heroic narrative of ethnic and cultural migration to tell. Rather, I now choose to mark my story with a break, a gap, a rupture, a violation made with an almost villainous volition—I become an evangelical Christian in Boston during the summer of 2000. I remember the shock and sorrow on my father’s face when I tell him a full year later. I had long since discarded the string across my body, but that moment with my father is when I figuratively snap that string, when I violate the continuity of my patriarchal Brahmin Indian heritage to assimilate instead into a deep complicity with a patriotic Christian American Whiteness.

Writing this, now, as an intertwined thread of a story weaving a string of three stories, as an intertwined body among three male bodies, I’m aware of the privilege in the above scenes, half-remembered and half-imagined, vaguely evasive in their details when it comes to truths and complicities. I remember another set of words from Bryant, when he describes his mother telling him: “The weight of your privilege rests on your father’s back!”. ¹² I remember Claudio writing about his absent father’s visceral disruption of the dinner table during his rare appearances. ¹³ Both of their fathers are now absent—my father is still alive, and yet I do not have the courage to talk with him about what I’m writing now.

I come home from campus, but my mind is elsewhere at the end of the semester—on the undergraduate papers I need to grade, on the graduate papers I need to write, on the thesis I have yet to finish, on this article draft I need to write with Bryant and Claudio, on the half-finished application for U.S. citizenship that I cannot finish until I get clearance from Selective Service, on the half-finished application form for Eliana’s American passport that I do not want to finish because it wants to know the nationality of her father. I open the door to our tiny apartment and I hear Alexis and Eliana around the corner, in our cramped kitchen. They can’t see me as I take off my shoes in the entryway, so I call out to them. Eliana starts chirping, “Papa! Papa!” from her high chair and keeps saying it as I walk into the kitchen, her little one-year-old body half-twisted around to see me. Alexis says, “Papa’s home!” as I sit down to eat. Eliana is making gurgling noises, but I am focused on my food, hungry and yet trying to unwind. Alexis says something that I can’t quite make out, so I look up and grunt abruptly, “Huh?” I realize Eliana is silent and I look toward her—she’s watching me quietly, intently, and when I look at her she squeals and smiles widely, starts babbling. And I see myself in her big wide eyes, seeing the him that I am becoming, seeing me as him as me becoming copresent, things coming out of my mouth reminding me of things he would say, things I had promised myself I would not say.

I smile, briefly, absently, and look at my plate again. I am not that man—am I? Or maybe truth like complicity is in the blood, and in time will blood tell?

Rituals of Parenting

Bryant: Well-meaning friends often tell me that I would make a great dad. And while I take that as a compliment, I often wonder about the criteria that they use to make such an assessment. I wonder if they believe that my general care with my students would translate to my own children. I wonder if when they see me in silly play with their children, or keeping a stash of candy and small toys in my office for the children of my working-class, mostly Latino students, as they are dragged to school, because mom or dad can’t afford a sitter—if they believe that such care or consideration would translate to my would-be, probably slightly more privileged children.

I wonder.

I wonder what is the criterion of being a great dad that they assume that I could be? I am not sure if I had the model in my own home. And The Cosby Show coming into my home on the Thursday night NBC screen was not realistic for any household. Certainly not for the Black upper-lowerclass life that I lived as a kid, and maybe not even in the life of Bill Cosby himself—as he defensively creates a campaign moving across the country blaming and belittling (bad) Black parents, promoting the dangerous myth that blacks who don’t “make it” have only themselves to blame, as he floats his doctorate of education degree and his television persona as some credibility factor on parenting. ¹⁴

I started off my college years as an elementary education major. It wasn’t until my second year when I needed to spend time at a local elementary school as a teacher’s aid that I began to question my choice of majors. When I approached my mother with my concern, telling her that maybe I would like to change my major to secondary education (working with high school students)—my mother quickly said, “Maybe that would be a good idea.” And while I was happy about her support, the quickness of her response concerned me and I asked why? My mother simply said, “Keith—you really have very little patience with/for little children.” And in that moment I became indignant as my mother then gave me the evidence of her position. She said, “I see you with your nieces and nephews. You are a great uncle and they love you. You play with them and you give them little gifts, but when your patience runs out with them you are done. And like your father, you runaway.” And I wasn’t sure which part of that explanation should cause me more alarm—“when your patience runs out” or “And like your father, you runaway.” It was the latter.

When my brothers and sisters and I were young—my dad played with us in silly ways, sometimes playfully teasing on whatever was the most recent teen or preteen sensitivity, sometimes trying to play ball in the yard mimicking the pretense of virtuosity, sometimes dancing around the house shirtless in his sleeveless white undershirt often tugging at the strings of my mother’s apron or sleeve in a pretense of fanciful partner dancing. Yet I do remember that such gleeful play was intense and short-lived; always my father’s mood would shift and he’d begin to shy away, often retreating into the house or living room, becoming lost in a television movie, lost in thought that was somehow neither focused on the here nor there. I would often join him in that place of solitude, and periodically we would engage each other through the film in a kind of coded talk about everything and about nothing. And when he really didn’t want to be bothered—he retreated into his bedroom to listen to music alone. And even as a child, I wondered if by engaging us in those intense bouts of play—if he felt that he had met his fatherly duty. (Was that the criterion?) I wondered if he had limited patience for play, or limited patience for little children, for his children. Years later I would watch my father with his grand children and the pattern would be continued. So when my mother made that comparison—my father with his children and me with my potential students, I paused. I thought about the limits of in loco parentis that would be a space of entrapment with me and other people’s children, ¹⁵ and that moment profoundly shaped my pleasure and displeasure with teaching on the elementary level, and maybe with the idea of parenting, at least then, and maybe even still, for now.

I am tickled with an aspect of my father’s parenting. Everyday when my father came home, in the mix of work-a-day smells from his job as a garbage man and the fatigue of labor, he would manage to pull from his pocket a small snack—a slice of gum, a piece of hard candy, a packet of cookies. He would slip that to me as a personal and private little gift for his one kid (number 5 of 7) who would wait at the door when he came home and helped him take off his boots. I don’t have a son to help me take off my shoes when I get home. And maybe regretfully, like Hari, I don’t have a little one-year-old daughter turning from her highchair to see me as I enter into the room. But almost everyday when I am at work, I stick my hands in my pocket to grab a pen, keys, or a coin, and what I find is a dog biscuit, and I am tickled.

I am tickled because somehow as I leave home in the morning, or through some weird alternations of my workday, I manage to find a dog biscuit in my pocket that reminds me of my girls at home (a female dog and cat). I know, when I arrive at home, before fully reaching the porch that I will hear my dog (Peppy) barking to greet me. Somehow, maybe by the sound of the engine of my truck pulling into the yard or the distant jing-jangle, jing-jangle of my keys— signals to her my impending arrival. She engages in a babble of barking. My partner (Patrick), will let Peppy momentarily out in the backyard to ease my entrance in the front door. The cat (Peanut), will greet me at the door first with a series of intense meows and a slow drag along my ankle that all cat parents know and understand. She will then run to her feeding station near the backdoor where she knows I will come to give her a treat of wet cat food. Once I am in the house, Patrick will let Peppy back in saying, “The other Daddy is home!”—as the dog is running towards me. And after her bountiful attack that allows me the official release from my workday, I will reach into my pocket to give her the treat that I have long carried for her in my pocket all day, then I will move to give the cat her treat. Somewhere in the middle, my partner and I kiss, and he will ask me about my day. These are the family rituals of our life.

Of course, my experience is not the same as Claudio and Hari meeting their beautiful children when they arrive at home, but for me, for now, this is the extent of my parenting. And the tensions in my life with my father still remain mostly unspoken, but there are momentary points of remembrance in which being or becoming my father—are not too bad. And while I embrace those good moments—I still temper them with the reality of my full life with father. Those moments in which the synchronicity of modulated experiences ring with fondness, against those other moments when leaving is not an option, and staying creates a space of entrapment for all, both in the there and then, the spaces from where I was growing up and where I am now. I embrace some of those moments and still resist others. And maybe in this case, resistance is both an act of not becoming (or overcoming) as well as a process of conducting oneself through the substantive conditions of living.

I am my father’s son, and there are more intrinsic strings that tie us together that cannot be easily removed or unknotted. So I must live with the inextricability of that connection, how it plays on/in the materiality of my own being, and the still growing knowledge of what that all means.

Claudio: I despise what I call empty scholarship. In simple terms, what I write and produce have to reflect the values I have in living my life. For example, how can I include a quote by bell hooks in my writing and then go home to be a jerk with Dani. It is simple and yet . . .

My children and I have for quite some time a ritual when I get home that started some years ago. As soon as they hear me opening the door they hide. When I am in the living room I hear their voices: “Where is Francisco?” Comes from one part of the house. And “Where is Analua?” Comes from another. Then, I start going from room to room, pretending to not see Francisco and Analua moving around so I can’t “find” them. After a while, they give a clue that it is the right moment to find them, and then we hug each other while they tell me all the places they hid. One of them may say, “Dad, I was under the chair in the kitchen and when you turned your back, I went to hide behind the computer desk in the living room.” When it started, I believe Francisco thought that I could not see him. Analua would go with the game. Now, both of them “know” that I can see them but we keep playing it anyways, and yet . . .

I unlock the door of my house. Entering the living room I hear the steps of my children going to hide. “Dear God,” I think, “when are they going to grow up? Enough is enough!” I ignore everything and go directly to my computer. I am stressed, in a bad mood, and I need to check my email.

“Where is Francisco?” “Where is Analua?”

“God! Don’t they know I don’t have time?” I burble to myself and keep looking at the computer. I am so tired.

“Where is Francisco?” “Where is Analua?”

This time louder.

“These kids are testing me . . . can’t they see they are playing with fire.” I keep reading my email.

“Where is Francisco?” “Where is Analua?”

Well, this time, they yell their lungs out.

That’s it. “Analua! Francisco!” This time I am screaming. “Stop right now. Don’t you see I am busy here? I need to work. Who’s going to bring money to pay the mortgage? Who put food on the table? Enough . . . both of you are in time out . . . go to your room until I say you can leave!” My face is probably distorted with rage. I am drenched in sweat.

Really, for the first time I take my eyes off the computer screen. I can see fear in my children’s face and tears pouring through their eyes. I can see astonishment in Dani’s expression!

“To your room now!” I yell again.

Kids run to their room. I look at Dani and see a disapproving face. She goes after them. In that moment . . . I am that man.

I, the assistant professor, full of privilege!

I did not have to cut 12 tons of sugar cane a day . . . I spent my day in front of a computer trying to write.

I, the assistant professor, full of privilege, who brags to not accept performances of white supremacy in my classroom.

I, the assistant professor, full of privilege.

The white heterosexual patriarch of my house!

I, the assistant professor, full of privilege who writes empty scholarship. Full of scholar shit!

In that moment . . . I am that man.

It may be that I find purity in Biology!

I look at the empty living room. “What have I done? Why?” I ask no one. Holding tears I run after my family. I get in their room and begin to apologize . . . begging for their forgiveness. You know what is more complicated than anything else? I can tell that what my children really want more is to forgive me. Their love for me, at that age, is unconditional. Get my shit together . . . ’cause I know they will not forgive me forever. I am not only biology . . . I am not that man, am I?

Cleaning old tears from her face, Analua looks at me and says, “Daddy, let’s play the game again. Let’s pretend you did not arrive yet. You go outside . . .”

“And enter the house again!” Francisco finishes for her, both of them now smiling.

Paraphrasing Bryant. . .

Where, amazed and scared, I see myself in his description of his father:

When my patience runs out I explode

And like my father I runaway

My gleeful play with my children Intense and short lived

Like Bryant I wonder,

If engaging with my children in these intense bouts of play I meet my fatherly duty. . .

Is that my criterion?

Do I have limited patience to play? Or a limited patience with little children?

My own children?

Cleaning my own face, yearning for another chance, I go out again. Tensive between relief and shame, I make my new entrance.

Borrowing from my friends, together with my writing partners: “I am not that man—am I? Or maybe truth like complicity is in the blood, and in time will blood tell?”

Hari:

The workers at the factory

in Yemen

where my father worked

had a nickname for my father

Assad

the Arabic word for

Lion

because of his legendary

temper.

He was their boss, an engineer,

then the Chief Engineer,

and eventually the Technical Manager

for

a whole group of factories.

Time for

a rupture

a break

an element of

difference

that violates

laws of repetition

and re-presentation

even in the act of

repeating

retelling

representing it/self.

As I look through old pictures, the few that I have here with me,

Alexis asks me, “Don’t you have any with your father smiling?”

And I say, “No.”

And that’s not quite true. There are pictures where my father is smiling. But the ones I have of him at work, both physically and in my memory of him, do not involve many smiles.

The few times when he would take me with him to his workplace, to the factory, were always awkward intersections of masculinity and privilege.

Me, his scrawny sickly son, and

him, the unquestioned ruler of the factory floor, and

the mechanics, the rough and stinking Yemeni and Indian and Pakistani workers, and

the general manager, suave and perfumed, whose father owned the entire group of factories.

I often wondered which of these masculinities and privileges did my father wish I would embody.

Even then I knew there was a difference between

the hot factory floor where my father reigned frowning

and the humid office floor where my father worked quietly

and the air-conditioned manager’s floor where my father went carefully smiling.

And the moments when those differences collided and blurred

when I saw my father not just yelling at a mechanic but

grabbing a spanner himself and climbing into the

thrashing and churning metal bowels

of some ungodly monster of a machine

swearing loudly from within to emerge

face distorted with rage and

body drenched in sweat and

office clothes streaked with grease triumphant

in fixing yet another mechanical breakdown

made no sense. I realized many years later that my father had started on the factory floor when he had to drop out of school at 16 to support his parents and brother and sisters after his father had to retire. I wondered whether this was why my father always had a quiet tension whenever someone called him an engineer—he never got an engineering degree. I wondered whether this was why he silently resisted the father–son narratives playing out in the echelons of family-owned management above him and forever out of his reach, even as he dreamed of similar possibilities for him and me. My mother often told me that my father felt a sense of both loyalty and entrapment toward his employers—the owners who respected his expertise even though he did not have a degree, and their sons, his managers, who knew he would not be hired by their competitors for the same reason.

The Lion always stayed at the factory; I never saw my father lose his temper at home. The only time I remember him slapping me was when, “after having a childish disagreement with my dad, I walked away mumbling under my breath,” ¹⁶ saying something I don’t remember now about his “stupid factory job.” I heard stories from my parents about life before Yemen, about the poverty and hunger and unemployment that created spaces of entrapment for my father as he moved his young family constantly all around India before eventually leaving to work in Yemen, but most of my memories are after Yemen, when I gradually became accustomed to a life of material privilege in a jet-setting global middle class.

At some point my father became obsessed with that life, with that material privilege. And I cannot say I do not understand. And I cannot say that I did not “go there”—I have certainly benefited from the traveling privilege of being my father’s son. His obsession fueled my initial trajectory toward engineering as a career—getting the engineering degree that he never got, getting the engineering graduate degree that he could never dream of, sitting in air-conditioned offices in front of computers trying to write words instead of wrestling with machines or sugarcane or garbage.

And no matter how much I resisted my father’s narratives, how far I have estranged myself from my father’s obsessions and possessions, how much damage I have done to our relationship through my rejection and rebellion against his exercises of power and privilege, no matter how much I have proven to my father that he cannot fix our relational breakdown—the fact remains that the weight of my middle-class privilege rests on his back, on the material benefits he brought home as the patriarch. I temper those benefits with the reality of life with my father, remembering both the benefits resulting from and the spaces of entrapment created by his obsessions, both in the there and then.

It is March 2011, and the phone rings. My father is calling from Cairo, Egypt. He is with my mother at the airport—they are leaving after a brief work visit, which had been postponed due to the recent revolution that unseated Hosni Mubarak. But there’s something wrong—my father’s voice is tense, nervous. He quietly whispers that he’s going to talk in Tamil instead of English, but he ends up dropping quite a few English words into the conversation, words like: hotel, riot, protests, violence. The anti-Mubarak protests happened several weeks ago, but something new happened outside the hotel where they were staying, as they were leaving earlier that day—an angry crowd gathered outside and surged into the lobby, breaking things and throwing punches while my father stood at the reception desk. My father seems shaken; he tells me he didn’t know what the crowd would do, bodies distorted with rage and drenched in sweat. He worried that all it would take was one guy to shout, “Hey, kill those foreigners!”

In that moment I am transported to a remembrance from some 17 years ago, in 1994, just before civil war erupted in Yemen, when my father and I were huddled in our apartment, worried about the rioting crowds in the streets outside. The crowds were/are angry at rampant inflation and overwhelming unemployment, when the few Yemenis that had jobs were paid in increasingly worthless Riyals while companies paid American dollars to foreign workers, foreigners like us. We worried that all it would take was one guy to shout, “Hey, those foreigners live in this apartment building!”

My father says something that jolts me back to March 2011, to the airport in Cairo and me in my Amherst apartment—my father is describing how he and my mother had to hide their expensive watches because they did not want to be seen by the Cairo protestors as “rich foreigners.” I am suddenly disgusted by my father’s obsessions with the trappings of class mobility and privilege, yet again, but his comment also suddenly triggers my own obsessions—here I am in the middle of applying for U.S. citizenship, with an FBI background check in progress, and I am on the phone with someone in Cairo, a wealthy traveler connected to a Middle Eastern industrial group based in Yemen. While my father worries about whether his material status markers will distinguish him from other Indian and Pakistani workers, I worry about whether my social status markers will distinguish me from other Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S. The phone line crackles with digital artifacts—that click I just heard, could it be a wiretap? My paranoia goes into overdrive, the line between my father and I become a new space of entrapment, and I hurriedly whisper to my father that we should talk later. It isn’t until after I hang up that I wonder if there would be a later. It isn’t until after I break the connection that my heart aches with a desperate fondness.

In such moments I become

the empty scholar

more obsessed with hoarding

my privileged

social capital

through acts

of smiling complicity

instead of obsessing about

“criticizing and refusing [. . .] the norms that make my life unlivable” (Moreira, 2008, p. 609)

believing, loving, becoming

“What I Am Doing And Being [. . .] obsessed with—ING” ¹⁷

I am my father’s son, and there are more intrinsic strings that tie us together that cannot be unknotted. I must live with the inextricability of that connection, how it plays on/in the materiality of my own being.

A Case of Challenge Singing: A Conclusion

Challenge singing and the Atlantic cultural triangle . . . One morning in February 1994, walking through a big market in the city of Salvador, or Bahia, my head protected against the fierce sun, I heard a black man and a white man singing and accompanying themselves on amplified guitars. My Brazilian son-in-law told me later that from their appearance and accent he knew these were not city-dwellers but men from the sertão, the backwoods of northeastern Brazil. They took it in turns to sing, vying with each other in word play and tongue-twisters and witty comments on local personalities and local events. . . . This kind of semi-improvised song, known generally in Brazil as desafio, or challenge singing, shows how three traditions from two continents, having already merged in Portugal, have merged still more intimately and seamlessly in Brazil. In Portugal such a song is often called a “duelling song” (canto a atirar, literally a “shooting song”), and one variety of it is heard in the Lisbon fado when two singers take it in turns to sing verses (fado d’atirar or desgarrada). . . . The challenge singing of Portugal, the Azores and Brazil is thought to be related to the Provençal tenso, a twelfth-and thirteenth-century verse debate between two troubadours, and to the similar Catalan partimen. (Fryer, 2000, p.1)

The preceding quote is from the introduction to Peter Fryer’s book, Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil. While our project has not been about musical heritage of a particular region, the opening words of Fryer’s book signals a more important component of our project as well as studies of social practice already hybridized and informed by intersecting cultural rhythms, and maybe more important, by the gendered and relational ties that bind men in shared experiences across borders of race/ethnicity/culture and geography. In particular, the notion of challenge singing, an interactive lyrical word play and debate across racial divides, might be an alternate descriptive of this current project—and might in some meaningful ways speak to methodology: writing between-the-three that is a method of inquiry, embodied experience, and a performative venture (Gale & Wyatt, 2009, p. 5). For surely in this terzetto, we—an African American man, a Brazilian man, and an Indian man have taken turns singing and sometimes even wailing, vying with each other in wordplay, poetic riffs of each other, tongue-twisters, and witty (and not so witty) comments on experiences with our fathers.

In this project we have been marking rhythms of resistance against what, in some cases, has been a musical dirge in the sound track of our lives with our fathers. Each of us is conscious of the fact that we are now city dwellers who engaged this project of recall and critical reflection with the instrumentality of a particular academic enculturation that is different from the homeplace of our origins, the backwoods locations where our fathers perpetually dwelled and where we left them. So our critique is slightly tempered, tempered with the knowledge of the different conditions under which our fathers and we labored. Yet we resist the complicity of blood (as much as we can) that might perpetuate a pattern of being in spite of our best efforts against becoming our fathers. And through the critical engagement of memory we traverse the borders between our past and our current locations, confronting our privilege to write of such things while comforting our paternal yearnings in a quiet tension between needing to write and resisting remembrance.

This article has been a semi-improvised song, and at times, maybe even a debate between the authors designed, not to be combative but, to get to a particular set of truths, to give insight to a larger transracial/transcultural/transglobal phenomenon of articulating father–son relationships that emerged in the writing. Our tool has been autoethnography and performative writing, which often serves as an amplification of lived experience for the closer scrutiny of meaning in a particular cultural context or a mode of human engagement.

In the process, we have been engaged in seeing and hearing again the visible details and faint sounds of messages from the past that emerge in the retelling of experience.

In the process, we have been entertained and informed as we strive to be better parents and different men—something that we hope, in the discontents of their own labor, our own fathers would want us to be.

In the process, we have been striving to be the kind of men and scholars who write possibility into being.

In the process, we have been striving to engage a type of writing that embodies and modulates between feeling and critical thought, which are sometimes thought of as antithetical performances of masculinity, a type of writing that is not only performative but also productive.

And in the process, we have been seeking to engage a type of writing that informs and transforms, establishing mechanisms of meaning making for others and ourselves, forever conscious of scholarship as a politics of evidence ¹⁸ and keeping our scholarship grounded in the practicalities of our daily living that gives truth to experience and possibility to the imagined.

These are technologies of knowing and being that bridge the chasm of time between us and our fathers.

Time in the distance of geography as well as time in the irreconcilable separation between the living and the dead, regretted sayings and mourned not sayings.

We three men, separated by the materiality of difference (Bryant, Claudio, Hari), have found psychic connections through the articulation of lived experience that provide each other comfort and refuge in our processes of becoming, better men.