InDigest
By: Charles Greene
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Divided We Fall is the end product of a journey undertaken out of the human need to act in the face of the violence, racism, and disinformation, which overtook our country after September 11th, 2001. It is the result of the efforts of Valarie Kaur, a young Sikh American who at the age of 20 decided to take a year out of her college experience, grab a video camera and, along with her cousin Sonny Singh, cross the US in search of the stories and experiences of Sikh Americans, Arab Americans, and others affected by the backlash of violence which swept the nation almost from the very moments the twin towers fell.
Making its debut in the fall of 2006, Divided We Fall is a documentary five years in the making. It premiered on September 14th, the anniversary of the death of Balbir Sodhi, around whose story all of the other stories in the film revolve. It has received numerous accolades including Best International Documentary at the ReelWorld Film Festival of Toronto, Best Documentary - Audience Choice at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, and Best Documentary at the New Jersey Independent South Asian Ciné Fest, and is currently being toured by the filmmakers at selected sites around the nation. According to information from the official website Divided We Fall is slated for release in theaters and/or television and home video beginning in fall 2008.
The following is an excerpt from a phone conversation with filmmaker and activist Valarie Kaur. Since the film’s debut, Valarie’s time, voice, and ideas have been in constant demand. Just peruse the “In The News” section of the DWF homepage and you get an idea of her popularity with the mainstream press. And yet, despite being interviewed by the likes of CNN, NPR, and the BBC (to name just a few of her suitors), Valarie was kind enough to slum it with me, and share some of her thoughts about America, the Sikh American community, and herself.
ID: What was the community setting that you grew up in?
VK: I usually characterize my childhood as feeling sort of in-between, an in-between-ness. I say that because my grandfather came in 1913 to California; my father was born on that same land that he had farmed; I was born on that land, so I have very deep American roots. As a third-generation Sikh American I was very rare. At school I felt like I didn’t fully belong because most of the kids there were predominantly Christian, and I went thorough a series of very painful, very aggressive encounters with friends and teachers who sought to convert me to Christianity. At the same time, at the local Gurdwara I never felt like I belonged there because most of my peers were second generation so their parents were Indian immigrants, they had proper Punjabi Sikh names, could speak and understand fluent Punjabi. My name was Valarie, I had very broken Punjabi, I felt like my family were outsiders at the Gurdwara. I was an outsider without really understanding until much later.
ID: And the Gurdwara, was that a place near where you lived?
VK: Yes, for any Sikh community the Gurdwara is the center of Sikh community life. The joke is that if there are two Sikh families anywhere in the country there’s a Gurdwara.
ID: Could you talk a little bit about that dichotomy and about going to school and feeling different? What were the things that made that feeling of exclusion acute for you?
VK: What it was that made me feel so excluded… it’s very interesting because I don’t think I faced what my [Sikh] peers faced in school or in their communities where they were teased because of the color of their skin or the accent of their parents or how their parents dressed. I never really was conscious of any kind of racism growing up.
ID: Were there students of other races? Was there a multi-ethnic or multi-racial mix in your community or school?
VK: I would say it was predominantly White, and I think the Hmong community in the Fresno area is the largest in America, and the Mexican community, and very few Black Americans. I think I could have gotten by without having been made to feel very different except for religion. It was religion that made me really conscious of difference and exclusion and oppression.
ID: Do you think that had you been raised Christian your experience would have seemed pretty normal? Had your family not had that connection to the Gurdwara?
VK: Yeah, it was less a connection to the Gurdwara and more a consciousness of not being Christian. But I think you’re absolutely right because I had friends who were of different races who seemed to have a pretty normal childhood. I’m sure there were racist incidents, but at least for me, I excelled at school, I didn’t wear any overt articles of faith that marked me, so the racism wasn’t overt and it only came about in my relationships when it came to religious difference.
ID: And you said that in your relationships with other Sikhs and in the Gurdwara you felt that status of outsider to some degree. How did that manifest itself?
VK: I felt that I was never Sikh enough. I remember being teased by the teacher in front of the entire class because I did not have a proper Sikh name. I remember feeling not as good because my peers could just whip out this Punjabi writing and speaking…
ID [interrupts]: I’m sorry…did you ever ask your parents why you were not given a proper Sikh name?
VK: Yeah, I think this is a testament to my third-generation status. My dad was born here and I was born on Valentine’s Day so naturally they were like, “Oh! We should name her Valarie.” [chuckles] Actually, Sikh kids usually get Sikh names and then they have an American nickname in school, but for me my name was Valarie and on my birth certificate they added a Rajith at the end of it to make it a Sikh name. But Val Rajith is just a nonsense word, so when I would try to tell my elders this is my name they would laugh even more because it didn’t make any sense. [laughs] So I really think my name was a testament to being born third-generation.
ID: Do you think that it was an attempt on the part of your parents to Americanize you?
VK: I don’t think so. There is an old saying: “what the son forgets the grandson remembers.” Or in my case what the son forgets the granddaughter remembers. I know that my father’s childhood was predominantly shaped by the need to assimilate. He joined a fraternity at college, became a marine biologist, and just really tried to downplay anything that would make him standout as different. So, when I was born I had the luxury of feeling like I was normal enough until I found the one thing that did make me different and I wanted to learn more about it.
ID: I recall your father in the film talking about he and his sister being the only people of Indian descent in his school, and the subtext of that being the feeling of being an exotic person, so I guess I can understand being 2nd generation and having that need or that feeling of wanting to assimilate.
I know you’ve talked about this a little bit already, but could you speak a little more about this idea of Americanism and what it means to be American, because that’s something I’ve been trying to sort out lately. What do you think it means to be an American?
VK [pauses]: Wow. [laughs] No one’s ever asked me that point blank. The film was all about it. [laughs]
ID: I think it was because of the film that the question came to me so directly. There were Sikhs in different parts of the film who were adamant that they were American.
VK: Let me just start with them first. Many parallel [the Sikh consciousness] to the Jewish consciousness, in that this community has been a religious minority since its very inception, has been persecuted wherever they’ve gone and has been homeless to an extent. The Sikh religion developed out of a devotional movement in the 14th century in India. Soon after its formation, there were encounters with Mughal invaders. Sikh history is fraught with battles and martyrdom and sacrifice; after the independence of India in 1947 many Sikhs were killed in the rioting that consumed India during partition. Hindus and Sikhs moved to one side and Muslims to the other. In the decades that followed, under an increasingly Hindu nationalist government, Sikhs felt increasingly disempowered by Hindus, which resulted in the Sikh massacres of 1984 in New Delhi. So, I’m trying to give you a sense of, from the very beginning, the Sikh feeling of “we’re a minority and we have to fight and struggle to be alive.” We wear our articles of faith because our Gurus, our teachers, said we would never hide in the face of oppression, that we would be strong, that we would be saint soldiers, an elect few who would follow this narrow path. Many Sikhs after 1984 immigrated to America and here you have families like the Sodhi family, who have come to escape religious persecution, to find freedom. Going back several years before 9/11 to the Oklahoma City bombings and the Persian Gulf crisis, the feeling of being caught up in anti-Muslim racism and hatred, and then after 9/11, being at the forefront of that kind of violence…whenever I spoke to Sikhs — whether they were elders in the community, or my peers, or kids — they told me about how they made sense of the hate violence. They talked about it in terms of a stream of persecution that we as Sikhs have faced since the very beginning. The way that they choose to face it is by drawing strength from stories of resistance in the past. There is this feeling that we are Sikhs and we are going to be persecuted, and the way that we are going to overcome it is by remembering our legacy of fighting. So, when I ask [Sikh] people what it means to be American, for them America is supposed to be this place where we can have a home. We’ve never had a home in Punjab, we’ve never had a home in India; this country has presented itself in our mythology as a place where we can have our stores and our homes and raise our kids and make it because we work hard. America is synonymous to a haven of liberty, and I think that’s similar for many immigrants who have felt persecuted. At the same time, after the hate violence took place I asked many Sikhs whether they wanted to go back to India, and there was this utmost refusal, like, “No. I’m American. Why don’t people see me as American?” I think for them to be American is to sacrifice to be here. They had to sacrifice so much just to make a home here; that alone should count as enough for them to be American. And there’s something about the physical landscape, the social landscape, the freedom to create in this landscape a new beginning. I think that’s all a part of what it means for them to be here. Does that make sense? [laughs]
