Out Of Place

I am writing this short blog post only to be honest, honest with you as my readers, honest with those I am meeting with and learning from here in India, honest with those I am teaching, and honest with myself. A week and a half into my travels, I feel uncomfortably out of place.

Although I was welcomed warmly by the LAFTI community upon arrival, it is not an easy community to make one’s way into, let alone fit in. When I approached my mother and father with this particular frustration, they explained the following. This is a community of people who, until very recently, were deemed a curse to the streets and villages in which they were born. They have served endlessly with no return for their services, have had their energies exploited for the demands of the landlords to which they have been bonded, and have lost their livelihoods only for the short-term financial benefit of a million multinational corporations that damage their lands in a way that is really and truly, irreversible.

Now that I am personally understanding and living with those who have experienced the social effects of a suppressed peoples’ history, it is no longer a surprise to me that I should feel out of place, and that knowledge is a relief in and of itself. No matter how brown my skin gets, regardless of how much Tamil I learn, apart from the amount of time I spend living and working at the LAFTI headquarters, I will never live as they have had to, I will never be an insider. Even after traveling back and forth for 32 years and being someone who is greatly dedicated to and educated about the Dalit community and its struggles, my own father is still seen as a guest and outsider by most all the staff and village workers. I think the realization that made the majority of my frustrations subside was that being an outsider is not necessarily a bad thing, nor were the characteristics I associated with my initial definition of an outsider completely correct. Being a so-called “outsider” is nothing more significant or meaningful than being on the outside of a history in relation to those who have lived inside it. Understanding that I am on the outside not because I am disliked or unwelcomed, but because there is really no way in. In the wider picture though, I am simply grateful that I have not had to exist in, struggle though, and recover from the history in which the Dalit community has lived for so long. Just as I am outside their house, outside of their history, they are outside mine, and for that there is no consequence of dislike or negative judgment but only a key to a door of which no copies can ever be made.