Daily Times

Forest School in northeast London was home to me for most of the 1980s. As it had been to the creators of a pioneering comedy sketch show that turned the mundane post-colonial narrative on its head by superbly satirising British cultural stereotypes about South Asians. Whilst poking equal fun at the latter’s own idiosyncrasies and biases. Cheque please! Rather controversially, this secondary school also counted amongst its alumni the young man behind the kidnapping and murderous beheading of an American journalist in Pakistan.

Yet when I think of these days — what springs to mind is the heady mix of big hair, Sun-In and perms. All laminated in squirts of industrial strength hairspray. This was also the time that I fell in love. He was England’s most miserable genius. And it was his poetry collection — The Whitsun Weddings — that turned my head.

We had a new English Literature A’ Level teacher. He was a bit of a rebel in that he always sided with pupils over senior teaching staff. There he was right in the thick of it: that failed lunchtime plot that saw most of us clambering on to the roof while the boys got into position, ready to water bomb the Head of Sixth Form. Who, sadly, must have got wind of what was afoot. For not once did he return to his office during the entire lunch hour. At the time, we believed that the ‘support’ from our rebel teacher afforded him untold street cred. Looking back, it should perhaps have signalled a warning of sorts.

According to Mr T, young American women had no right to protest campus rapes — simply because they are more privileged than women in India and Pakistan

I found myself in touch with him a few years ago, after coming across a comment he had left on a school friend’s social media post. He was a published author living in the US, married to another teacher from our school. They had cats. Naturally, we had much to talk about. For my part, I couldn’t bring myself to use his first name. Interested to know what I was doing here in Pakistan — I began to tell him some of the challenges of living here as an independent, unmarried yet crazy cat person. Some of which were not too dissimilar to living in England as an independent, unmarried crazy dog person.

It was almost imperceptible at first. The way he recast me with an identity of his own choosing: an oppressed Pakistani woman living in a country that is said to be no place for any of us women. Mere happenstance this was not. For it allowed him to reinvent himself as the Enlightened White Man, an authority on the Muslim world and the plight of women here. Given that he had spent a little time in the MENA region. Not to mention his stint teaching Pakistanis in England. Well, then.

Increasingly, he engineered our online conversations to critical assessment of how the US media covered rape. Manufactured contempt over how one such incident in India had yet to make headline news on CNN. Before proffering much needed Enlightened White Man insight: this is what Americans think of Muslims, that they are a bunch of ragtags. His Muslim world experience allowed him such liberty. A shame, then, that it didn’t afford him to recognise India was not an extension of Pakistan. Yet my greatest misstep came by way of musing about how a recent gang rape in this country — the one that isn’t the world’s largest democracy — hadn’t grabbed headlines here. For the simple and tragic reason that such crimes against women are all too commonplace.

Here, he informed, me was where I was going wrong. The patriarchy wasn’t at fault. It was those pesky young women in the US, those white, middle-class university students, those dastardly feminist activists. Those women whom he said took advantage of the confabulation of rape culture with patriarchy that reduces sexual politics in American universities to nothing more than a pro-active play for power. Which he believes is afforded by victim status. These conversations took place against the backdrop of the Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz’s endurance performance art, Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). Aimed at protesting the university authorities’ lackadaisical attitude towards a reported incident of rape.

According to Mr T, who was never part of the A-Team for obvious reasons, young women like her had no right to protest campus rapes — because they are more privileged than women in India and Pakistan who are routinely raped by factory owners. Thus does the Enlightened White Man pit women against each other as he casts himself in the role of judge, jury and proverbial executioner of crimes about which he has no understanding.

It was hard to know to what to respond first. Mr T gave not a fleeting thought to prevailing class systems in this part of the world, the small percentage of women who are not bonded labour. For the Enlightened White Man doesn’t do nuance. Far more comfortable is he reducing women here to a one-dimensional stereotype that is largely perpetuated by the western media. And men like him take this single stereotype to ‘justify’ his position that American students both cry false rape and have themselves created this on-campus rape culture through binge drinking and casual hook-ups.

This is cultural appropriation at its most base.

Thinking back to that day on the roof all those years ago. We should have thrown the water bombs anyway.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.com and tweets @humeiwei

Published in Daily Times, September 20^th 2017.