As a schoolgirl in North Carolina during the 90s I remember trying to devise a Halloween costume that would somehow align with my appearance as a brown-skinned person. I don\u2019t remember anyone telling me to think like this and being only half Indian, I am relatively fair skinned. I don\u2019t know when I started to notice that most of the female protagonists I consumed in media and stories looked different than I did. I really loved acting early on, and it frustrated me when I was always chosen for the character role instead of the heroine, cast as the Queen of Hearts when I auditioned for Alice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think the Halloween costume was totally unsupervised. We didn\u2019t go to a party store to pick something out. My single father took the no frills approach to things he did not personally believe were important, like clothing or seasoning in food. The choices (in my head) were Tiger Lily from Peter Pan or a Gypsy. I don\u2019t remember within what context or story I knew of Gypsies. Maybe it was the Disney version of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. As a Gypsy I wore a combination of clothing I got in special care packages from my mother. A gauzy shirt printed with purple and green flowers on a white background which I could still draw from memory, Indian bangles, and a skirt embroidered with mirrors. I learned early on the difference between objects made in India and other objects. I went in costume as myself then, or a self that wouldn\u2019t fly on a normal school day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I moved to Germany I learned that the word Gypsy is offensive. The Sinta and Roma are a nomadic people who migrated from Northern India to Europe in the Middle Ages. They have experienced discrimination since they\u2019ve been here and were among the many groups targeted and murdered in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I see Sinta and Roma very often where I have lived since 2015, in Berlin. The women have long braided hair and long velvet skirts, and you often see them begging on trains. When I lived in the neighborhood of Wedding I saw small Sinta and Roma children come out of a van where they were living and wondered if they had access to schools or the opportunity to take a bath. Germany has a social safety net that is slightly more helpful than the United States, but most privileges start with a registration of your place of residence, which can be tricky to get even when you pay rent. I am told that this registration system dates from National Socialism, when the government used it to keep track of the people they wanted to eliminate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years ago, I lived near the Central Train Station, which is next to a walled park where a German prison used to be and is now a memorial to people who were imprisoned. On the other side of the station there is a road with an overpass which you walk under to get to the Spree River. I often saw them camping out in this park or under the bridge. In the doorways of the walled park there was always human poop. I imagined that maybe they wanted to keep this space for themselves. It\u2019s rumored they have a pickpocket ring in the station. I have only been targeted by a pick pocket once in Germany, and she was European. If you walk on the other side of Spree River near the Brandenburger Tor, you will find a memorial to the Sinta and Roma that died in the Holocaust. It\u2019s a timeline of exactly what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The word Bohemian, as used to describe fashion and artistic ways of life, refers to the Sinta and Roma. Bohemia is a part of Europe including parts of Eastern Germany and the Czech Republic, which was one of their stops along the nomadic path to Paris. Artists in early 20th<\/sup> century European started to adopt aspects of Roma dress and lifestyles (think esotericism) in rebellion against Industrialization and Victorian conservatism and started calling it Bohemian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the time I was a preschool teacher at an international school in Berlin, my European colleagues once put on the Disney animated version of Peter Pan for a party. It wasn\u2019t something they consulted me about, so I had very little time to react. I didn\u2019t remember until the \u201cIndians\u201d came on screen how offensive the film\u2019s depiction of First Nations people is. It was the first time that I saw the movie as an adult. When I tried to explain to my colleagues that the film was offensive, they were shocked. I was the only person in the room who was educated in a way that would aid me in realizing it. I have taught often in Germany\u2019s so-called international schools and have noticed that most of the students and teachers are of European descent and German speaking. One of the international schools has banned Disney.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I now work at a very small Kindergarten on the edge of Berlin. I had to pass a test in German to work here. It\u2019s more accessible by bike than by public transport. We have very few children of European descent. Sometimes the children speak in Arabic to each other. I feel important as a brown authority figure for brown kids. The only Disney Princess the children talk to me about is Elsa, the magical Scandinavian princess from the movie Frozen. There are reasons the blue-eyed and blonde-haired princess is overwhelmingly popular, just like anything Scandinavian is a powerful brand in Germany. I have avoided watching Frozen, although I am vaguely aware that the storyline involves female friendship and a magical princess. It passes the Bechdel test. Maybe the children in my kindergarten love her because they aren\u2019t comparing themselves to blonde haired blue-eyed children? I\u2019ve been teaching kindergarten for a few years now and have a selection of costumes I use for Carnival in Kindergarten. I\u2019ve dressed as Jasmine from the Bollywood styled remake of Aladdin and danced to my favorite Arabic song twice. It\u2019s a collaboration by Acid Arab and the Yemeni-Arab- Israeli group AWA. I haven\u2019t translated the lyrics yet to see if they\u2019re okay. I\u2019m afraid dressing and dancing as Princess Jasmine would be offensive at this Kindergarten, where Muslim parents don\u2019t let male carers change their daughter\u2019s diapers. The top is like a corset, and I would have to wear a turtleneck under it. I have an Arabic-speaking child named Yasmin. She said she had never heard of Princess Jasmine or Aladdin. She also said I was strange when I dressed in traditional clothing for Diwali. Yasmin is crazy about Elsa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I tried to jog Yasmin\u2019s memory with key points of the Aladdin story. I wanted her to see herself as a princess. I realized the horrifying Scheherazade frame story is not something I wanted to tell her about, even if Scheherazade is a hero. I started to think internally that Princess Jasmine is a crap character anyway. I mean, she is just Aladdin\u2019s girlfriend and wife. It will be much safer to dress as Red Riding Hood from eminently present Brother\u2019s Grimm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are celebrating Carnival, or in Berlin, Fasching, next week. I learned that almost every single female child will dress as Disney princess of European origin. Two of them will have a generic princess dress. There is not enough time to source the firefighter or construction worker costume that I should probably wear as an educator to further widen the expectations of womanhood. I feel the need to play the Disney princess game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my present Kita, unlike the international Kitas with the privileged European parents, the parents do not talk openly about how they got to Berlin and their cultural background. This is a practice in international schools because it is part of the mission to celebrate internationalism. It\u2019s a norm I\u2019ve not been able to change yet at my Kita despite throwing a Diwali party earlier this year. I had the awkward where are you really from talk with one of the fathers one day in the cloak room, which in my case is a three-part question. Where are you from? Where were you born? Where are your parents from? Then I finally could say my mother was born in the Calcutta in the early 60\u2019s. Imagine how laborious it would be if I was descended from Chinese railroad workers on the West Coast. He said that was nice. Well, I didn\u2019t mind even if it was awkward. Where we are from should be a positive thing, not a taboo. It\u2019s only like that because we constantly fear discrimination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had a drink with an Iranian friend on Friday, who said that the Arabic children did not identify with Princess Jasmine because 1001 nights is Persian. I had to do some more research, because I\u2019m curious about who Princess Jasmine really is. Britannica explains that 1001 nights is a composite text of stories from medieval Persia and India that were originally orally transmitted. The Arabic collection of stories surfaced in the form of various versions throughout the Middle East from the 9th<\/sup> to 16th<\/sup> centuries. However, Aladdin was not attached to the collection until Antoine Galland started to translate it into French in the early years of 1700. According to the article in Time that came out to accompany the Aladdin remake in 2019, the story was sourced from a Syrian storyteller who had recently immigrated to Paris, Hanna Diyab. Scholars think that he himself must of invented the tale, because no one has been able to find an earlier version, and that reflects the rags-to-riches nature of his memoir which they found later. The original tale was set in China. It was the practice at the time to set anything that was far away in China without making anything about it Chinese. The Djinn or Genie in Aladdin does not belong to a Chinese cultural world. The chief characters have Persian names, and the other names are Arabic. So, Aladdin and his lady are a fantasy, an impossible cultural hodgepodge expressive of a migrant\u2019s hodgepodge reality, perfect for a Disney Movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a schoolgirl in North Carolina during the 90s I remember trying to devise a Halloween costume that would somehow align with my appearance as a brown-skinned person. I don\u2019t remember anyone telling me to think like this and being only half Indian, I am relatively fair skinned. I don\u2019t know when I started to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":26487,"template":"","categories":[70,10],"class_list":["post-26391","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-35","category-prosa"],"yoast_head":"\n