Skip to main content

Fiona's Story


It was difficult to interview Fiona – my last interviewee of the day – because her personality was so bang opposite of Melanie, who I interviewed right before her. For one, she spoke thrice faster than Melanie and kept narrating her story in an intricate web of verbal chaos – sans chronology, sans context.

Over and over again, I had to steer her back to the issue of food insecurity – because although I know everything else feeds into it, there were a lot of other intricate personal details which she presented to me that I knew had no link whatsoever to her present situation. But she talked and talked and talked – akin to someone who speaks to herself – her face furrowed with many misfortunes that life had dumped on her.

She had a prolapsed uterus AND a prolapsed bladder that caused urine retention. So she went every week to a local hospital so they could put a catheter in her. Her son-in-law had thrown her out and her sons won’t keep her so she divided her time between two local homeless shelters, eating at a local non-profit that provided good, nutritious food. In the meantime, her car was parked forever at a church parking lot, because it had run out of everything – gas, license ... you name it.

In the midst of her incessant narration, Fiona would wipe the small expanse of the table in front of us with the crumpled tissue with which she was also wiping her nose. So it was no surprise that my middle-class identity (not to mention of my post-positivistic, journalistic past) was rising in me off and on with involuntary haste. (And boy, did I have a hard time wrestling with it!)

But with Fiona too, I asked the same question about her children – as I had asked Melanie.

Did they know she was homeless?

They did.

Why would they not take her in?

Because they won’t.

For someone long acquainted with misery – Fiona said she had faced food insecurity earlier in her life a couple of times – Fiona spoke without a tear. She said her faith helped her – her love of God.

But ending the interview, I had the same thoughts that I had after speaking with Melanie – the fact that there was something fundamentally wrong with a social order where family means so little; where someone can be abandoned on the streets without a second thought; where a son can leave his mother alone to scavenge for food and shelter, while leading a comfortable life.

A 19th century Indian spiritual master once said that God takes the form of one’s parents, nourishing and raising an individual. In this country, where there is no dearth of churches and relentless Jesus-mongering, I wondered who would bring home that message of parental divinity? Or, do I already hear an American reader snickering at my previous sentence?


Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more