The value of history

            My train ride back home from Washington, D.C., was unusually long, due to an overnight I ended up making in New York City so that a) I could stay for as much of the Words Beats & Life Teach-In as possible and b) my husband would not have to pick me up in Albany (an hour's drive from our home) at 2 a.m. The upshot was that I left DC on a 10 p.m. train, traveled north with stops in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Trenton, and Newark, and arrived at New York City's Penn Station at 2 a.m. My train to Albany wasn't scheduled to depart until 7:15 a.m., which meant that I had five hours in New York City.

            I probably would have headed out to walk the streets of Manhattan if I hadn't been encumbered with a shoulder bag that sort of doubles awkwardly as a purse and briefcase, and if I hadn't been bone tired. I found out later that a rally against the Zimmerman verdict in Times Square might still have been occurring at 2 a.m. If I'd known that, I would have headed out for sure.

            Instead, I holed up in the Amtrak waiting lounge, and continued to read a book I had brought with me to read on the train: Bengali Harlem, a new history of some of the earliest immigrants from the Indian subcontinent to the United States. The study by Vivek Bald documents what is known of a group of Indian seamen and merchants who traversed the American coasts in the 1880s, entering the country sometimes through Ellis Island and sometimes through other, more underground means. Some of these seamen settled in Spanish Harlem (the site of Popmaster Fabel's documentary on his experience of moving from gang participation to hip-hop), after marrying women of Mexican descent.

            I was looking forward to reading this book because Bald had presented some of his preliminary material at an academic conference I attended a few years back. The stories he told in the presentation fascinated me because they opened up a new dimension of the historic presence of South Asians in the U.S. The book itself, however, has been a bit of a letdown in its first few chapters. I feel that Bald is trying too hard to force his readers into a narrative that continually ponders what life might have been like for these seafaring immigrants who in the United States were confronted simultaneously with images of Indian exoticism and racial segregation. Most of the individuals in the United States who had emigrated from Asia were subjected in the late 1890s through 1940s to the same restrictive segregation policies designed to keep African Americans "in their place." The climate of racial hostility  during those decades was such that many immigrants from Asia essentially masked themselves out of America's history. They changed names, kept a low profile, and often began to affiliate more with the Chicano, Spanish, Black, and creole communities that they married into. As a result, primary documents that might help one gain more of an insight into the lives of such individuals are sparse, at best. There also were very few memoirs or autobiographies published during that time. The strength of Bald's book, in fact, is in his assertion that the group of immigrants about whom he writes is, in a sense, a disappeared community. We can't really imagine what life was like because we have very little material to feed our imaginations with in this case. The immigrants, in some ways, wanted that secrecy, because the less that the mainstream world knew about them, the safer they would be in terms of how they lived and traversed the globe.

            Considering this thought led me to ask the question: What is the value of knowing the history of a people with whom you affiliate, of a people who came before you? Those questions, I feel, are highly germane to hip-hop, and help explain why veteran members of the hip-hop community emphasize the need always to know the history of the movement. Knowing the history -- with all of its seamy undersides -- gives one a sense, perhaps, that they are not alone.

            At the weekend teach-in, one participant after another remarked in both public acknowledgements and private conversations how grateful they were to learn about hip-hop's pioneers and how the movement started. The reasons for the gratitude varied, but they often constellated around an idea of growing up without role models and, as a result, a sense of being alone. It struck me that hip-hop history presents a rare opportunity to historians, which is to write histories while most of the key pioneers of the movement are still alive. The history that the pioneers tell is inconsistent and bumpy, but that's the real life of history. It is not a coherent unfolding; rather, it's a messy parchment of debate, argumentation, seemingly disparate facts, and sometimes tedious detail.

            I first learned that persons of Indian ancestry had settled in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from a paper written by Nitasha Sharma, who is now a professor at Northwestern University. Then, she was an undergraduate and had written the paper. I met her parents – Jagdish and Mimi Sharma – while I was at the University of Hawai‘i on a one-year mid-career fellowship for journalists that ultimately stretched into 11 years and a master’s and doctoral degree. Jagdish was teaching the History of India, and I was taking his class. After I expressed surprise that there had been Indians in the U.S. before the 1960s, he gave me a copy of his daughter’s paper.

            Over the years, my knowledge of the early history of Indian immigrants in the U.S. deepened. I learned about Swami Vivekananda’s heralded address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, as well as the race riots that erupted in Bellingham, Washington, in 1904 and involved a number of Indian émigrés working in lumber camps, the now-seven generation strong Punjabi Mexican communities in the Imperial Valley of California, and the radical Ghadar Party that fought for Indian independence from the British outside of India’s borders. This early history didn’t interest me because (for reasons that today seem arrogant) it didn’t seem to be about me. A decade or so later, I have come to realize that it was all about me.

            I had become a person isolated from other Indians because I had grown up without many persons of Indian ancestry around me. When my mother pushed me to become a medical doctor or engineer, it was because that was what she saw other Indians doing. After I got my way and studied journalism, I started to experience the lifelong isolation that comes with being racially, ethnically, and/or culturally different from the mainstream. There were other Indians working in journalism during the same time that I was. But I didn’t know many of them, perhaps because we didn’t have a way to imagine ourselves as integrated into the field.

            Hip-hop offers an answer to this isolation, and in that answer, I think history – the messy kind – is key. Knowing your story within hip-hop is one thing, but knowing that your story connects with scores of others makes it ever more powerful. Over the past five years, I have had the opportunity to hear many early figures within hip-hop tell their stories. I have scribbled notes furiously, seizing as many of the gems about the early days of hip-hop that they were dropping as I could. I wasn’t always sure why I was doing this because my research in hip-hop always was centered on the experiences of women in Seattle, doing hip-hop in the early twenty-first century, women born at least a decade after the first house parties and jams took place in the Bronx. I was always interested, though, and over the past few days, the rhyme behind the reason (I think I messed up the cliché, but it’s okay … cliché’s deserve to be destroyed, anyway) started to become apparent. Telling the stories was essential for the self-esteem of the younger generation of African Americans, Latinos, and others in America today. It is a way of showing – without directly saying – that the kids were not and would never be alone.