Decolonization Through The Selfie

A reminder of how photographs of the Brown body are precious.

Jan 30, 2022

Welcome to 2022 and my substack #12. Order your 2022 #MuslimVDay cards on my Etsy shop now! Soundtrack to this post: Pictures of You

1. I have found that lately when I ask for a selfie with a friend, it’s with a little shyness and a little feigned shame. I ask in an apologetic tone and a touch of embarrassment. It’s usually at the end of the event, when I realize that I have been so present in the moment, my phone had been in my purse the entire time. “I’m sorry,” I hope my tone conveys, “I’m not an influencer looking for social media capital on this moment, I don’t want to be like THEM, I just want a cute picture of us in this moment together. I just want to remember this moment together.” Of course, no one denies me a photo because what kind of an asshole friend would do that.

2. Yet all the same, my tone is deferential. Society has conditioned me to think of photos of the self as narcissism. A tool to be seen by strangers’ likes to feed the fragile ego. A Gen-Z tool of making money off an image of self.

Order your 2022 #MuslimVDay card set now!

3. I didn’t grow up with images of Brown people. I was a rebellious-good-girl teenage punk in the Californian 90s. We never saw Desi women images anywhere - unless we were watching LA18 on Saturday morning right after the cartoons finished. We’d switch channels, then it was Showbiz India and Namaste America back to back with a run through of the latest Bollywood music videos where video Desi girls would pop their boobs in tight cholis to Raghav. Rarely, there’d be a man-on-the-streets interview, with someone’s Brown uncle in some American city’s Indian enclave. When we did see a Desi face in American media, like a segment on the nightly news or in the newspaper, my mom would call us all over and point obviously (embarrassingly). It was always a Very Big Deal.

4. In those days, any kind of Desi-ish representation counted. If someone looked vaguely Ambiguously Brown in the Abercrombie catalogue or Seventeen magazine, it counted. Gwen wearing a bindi counted. Fisher Stevens patanking in Short Circuit 2 counted. The flutes in Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid In Full counted. Mangoes sold at the grocery stores counted. Shoot, Archie’s comics sold in the check-out aisle of groceries stores counted. Even Balki in Perfect Strangers counted.

5. I have lots pictures of myself as a baby in the 80s. I was born with a full head of black hair and had baby fat cheeks that I claimed through my teens. I had elbow dimples and creases in my thighs. I have pictures of me taken at the hospital, at JC Penny photo studios, wearing a poodle skirt on the first day of kindergarten in our backyard. I have a picture of me at three years old sitting at the center of an alpona on the floor at my Khala’s wedding. Pictures of me playing at the beach holding up my pebbled hands. Pictures of me cutting birthday at various parks in party dresses. My pictures chart the years through haircuts, from the toddler bowl cut to the pixie cut to the bob. Lots of pictures with my Mom. It made my youngest sister incredibly jealous because by the time she came along, the novelty of taking photos of the baby had worn off.

6. Abbu doesn’t remember buying his first camera, but he does remember he couldn’t afford one in Dhaka, so he would borrow a camera from a friend. When he immigrated to Los Angeles in 1970, he finally bought a Canon camera of his own, either at Kmart or Sears. Those were the only places they shopped back then. He took adult classes to learn how to develop his own film in a dark room – that’s where the 5x11 photo sets from Dana Point probably came from. In his friend group, Dad was the one that took all the photos. He’d make copies to give to the other uncles. By the time the 90s hit, he traded in his camera for a camcorder. My teenage years are locked in drawers of 8mm tape that we have no instrument to watch with. My dad will still take pictures, now on his phone. He currently texts us daily photos of the backyard cats rubbing on his legs. He doesn’t know how to print these photos and every time he switches phones, the photographs are lost. But he still takes them.

7. I like the touch-feel of Mom’s old photos. The matte paper is thick and textured. The colors of the white is a pale ivory and the black is so crisp. These are the 2-inch squared black and white photos from Mom’s youth in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Some are even smaller - an inch wide. The photos are so clear it is hard to believe they were taken over sixty years ago. The glossy colored Kodak photos from the 90s faded much more. In some of the photos, Mom and her sisters are posed like they were in a Vanity Fair fashion shoot – eating breakfast outside in the jungle, walking into the waves, riding a horse, or flying by on a bike or sitting in a rattan chair. My favorite photos are the ones where she is sitting by herself as teen, in bell bottoms and wide glasses and posing with a daisy by her face. My Nana didn’t own a camera in Bangladesh, either. He took all these pictures on a borrowed camera. When the family fled Pakistan in 1972 after my Nana was released from the camps, they packed all they could for their first flight out – these photos were the precious cargo in their two suitcases each. Now, I keep these photos safe in Los Angeles. These photos have gone around the world, these photos – Bangladesh to Pakistan to Bangladesh to Los Angeles to all those different places we lived throughout my youth. My Mom saved these photos preciously, in boxes, never framed. And now my mom is dead, and I am the keeper of these memories that don’t belong to me.

8. In the box where I saved my Mom’s photos, I look specifically for the ones with greenery. Her standing in front of a mango tree, playing in the grass as a toddler, fishing at a pond, eating breakfast on the patio, sitting on rocks in a forest. I scan and crop each at 1200 dpi and print on paper with ink. I swipe gel medium on a piece of wood and glue the printed paper face down on the canvass. The magic happens after it dries – with a little water, I rub the paper off and am left with inked images looking back at me. Then, I paint with a mustard yellow and then a bright orange and then a little bit of white and red. With a black felt tip eyeliner, I paint wavy stripes, long eyelashes, and downward whiskers, in the 19th century Kalighat style of art found in Calcutta. My Bengal Tiger mascot series – we are not other people’s mascot, we are our own.

9. Perpetually dating means you are perpetually thinking of photos to take that will market your body on dating apps. I have been consistently on dating apps (previously “dating websites”) for twenty years. So, because of this, you think of taking selfies all the time. You take selfies when you are out on a hike (to make you seem active), selfies when you are fully dolled up (to make you seem like you can be brought to parties), selfies with sexy cleavage and bedroom eyes (to make you seem fuckable), selfies with no-makeup-makeup look (to make you seem “natural”) selfies of you in mid-laugh (to make you seem “fun”), selfie of you doing something casually in the resistance (to make you seem like you have radical values, but not too radically militant.). The selfies should not be of you holding a fish you caught, or in front of a tiger, at the gym lifting weights or taken in a bathroom mirror. You can’t be too explicit about signaling wanting a husband (because that makes you seem “desperate”), so no selfies with you cooking, or playing with a baby or at a wedding. But also, you can’t be too explicit about being single (because that makes you seem “desperate”), so no selfies with your obsessive amount of cat-babies or plant-babies. Selfies should not be professional headshots (because that is trying too hard). Selfies should not reflect fame or money or that you are an independent woman (because men need to feel like they are “needed”) (and because another set of men are gold digging grifters). The selfies should make you seem like you are younger than the age you are lying about in the profile. Angles, angles, angles, lens held from up to, good lighting and beauty face filter.

10. Pro-Tip: Have a folder in your phone called “selfies” so that you can access your favorite photos of your face every time you re-upload your profile. Because it is an endless cycle of deleting the apps and re-installing the apps and looking for those pictures of yourself that you liked.

11. I do think it’s a little bittersweet that this skill was gained based on this need. I’m still single so who knows if it is a beneficial skill anyways.

12. At Waimea Canyon is where we had the fight to end all fights. He refused to take a selfie with me at the center of Kauai. We were there for a ten-day trip, a romantic trip, of just the two of us for New Years. Except it was anything but romantic as every little thing I did put him in a mood. I had fallen in love with the island immediately – the lush green tropical foliage and red soil and hot rain felt like a familiar home even though I’d never been. I wanted to take pictures of everything, to never forget. But he rolled his eyes whenever I took out my phone to take a picture and cringed when I asked him for selfies of us as a couple. So I just took selfies of myself. In that moment, he asked why I needed to take so many pictures. Why couldn’t I just live in the moment. Why did I need to share the images on the internet. That he didn’t need to take pictures to remember, he would just remember. By the end of the trip, I saw him sneaking in pictures of his own. We even got a sunset selfie together on the Na Pali Coast – our last photo together.

13. At Doris Duke’s Shangri-La, my selfies were a political act. I ran around the grounds and took selfies in laying in the sun on the bright white Calcutta marble, in the mirrored Mughal style bathroom, in front of the Moroccan arched windows, with the tiles painted with Persian dancer. Doris might have bought it with Tobacco money, but these items were mine. In my gut, walking on marble tiles felt like home. Belonged to my people. How dare she have access to my people’s luxuries when my mother never got to experience the luxuries of her people in her lifetime. For that week long residency at Shangri-La, I took selfies on every corner of the property I could, because I could and so many of my peoples couldn’t. I wanted Doris’ ghost to see me take it all back, visually, at least.

14. To take selfie as a Brown woman is to intentionally place myself in an image forever where people like me were not supposed to be. When there is no image of Brown women in these places, taking a selfie in these places is an act of rebellion, of protest. Selfies inside the White House. Selfies on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall getting an award. Selfies at old vacation homes of robber barrens where progressive conferences are now held. Selfies at the foot of the Himalayans Mountains or on beaches of Unawatatuna. Selfies in the Grand Bur Dubai Masjid Selfies at Sundance and SXSW. Selfies at all these locations where my Mother never would have had access to - so I take all the selfies in the off chance that she might see them now through me.

15. I took selfies in the pandemic that no one will see but me. Selfies after I did my makeup for Zooms, selfies when I rarely left the house, selfies still in bed. When you are a Single, you have no one else to be your witness but yourself. Isn’t that what marriage ultimately is – a lifelong witness? As a Single, especially in an isolated pandemic, your only witness is yourself. Selfies, then, are an act of defiance and representation, claiming that you will be seen when no one else will be there to see you. A narcissist might post selfies for outside validation but sometimes a selfie is to remind oneself that “I still exists.” When you don’t see Brown people or see images of Brown people - or any people in pandemic isolation – taking selfies are a reminder that Brown is indeed beautiful. The decolonization of beauty through images of the self.

16. When Nana was deep in dementia, they would put photos of people by his bed. He would look at the pictures daily when he woke up. When I visited him in Kathmandu, I would catch him sometimes staring at the wall of images. The doctors said in the chaos of his brain, the images were a grounding tool to remind him of who he was and who the people around him were. To remind him of his existence.

17. Take all the pictures. You exist. Brown is beautiful. Remember.