Culture Wrappings III: Please Keep Your Beautiful Feet Away from my Beautiful Books
There’s a scene in the kids TV show, Arthur, where Arthur and his friend Francine are accidentally locked in the local library one night. (At some point they find the break room where there’s food and drinks, so really it’s not the worst place to spend a night, at all.) At one point they attempt an escape by building stairs out of books in order to reach the high window latches.
I can’t watch that scene without cringing as their animated tennis shoes go pounding up the makeshift steps made from stacks of precious library books. The thought of whatever dreck from the outside being scraped across all of those wonderful covers invokes a pain not unlike period cramps. Granted, the cartoon sidewalks are usually spotless apart from the occasional pile of leaves and errant chewing gum, but that doesn’t mean it would have been any better if they’d taken their shoes off. Feet on books? No. Just, NO.
In Indian culture – and I know this holds true for many cultures across Asia – your feet and specifically the soles are the most ‘unclean’ part of your body – probably at some point in a literal sense but always in the symbolic. There are a lot of foot action taboos which pretty much link back to the same thing and that is to avoid being disrespectful or outright desecration of something. In Hindu culture, when taking blessings, as a show of respect we touch the tops of our elders’ feet to show that we will humble ourselves for them.
Don’t point your feet towards people or religious items and don’t sit like an oversized doll with your legs stuck out in front of you – or splayed for that matter – in temples or during religious ceremonies. Don’t touch anyone with your feet, it’s incredibly disrespectful – and cultural aspect aside, dragging your sweaty human paws which have collected the grime of your unswept floors is generally unappetizing.
Also, definitely, definitely keep your feet away from books, notebooks, paper, musical instruments, and generally all materials connected to learning. For those self-appointed experts on semantics, yes this includes computers. Although, unless you don’t have the use of your hands and must rely on your feet to accomplish most tasks, I can’t imagine many situations in which you would need to be rubbing your feet across your computer. Whether you think this is a strange, or irrelevant practice shouldn’t matter, but it’s something that is completely normal in a shared cultural space that easily creates a barrier outside of it.
There is the ‘divine’ explanation which is arguably the simpler one because it offers the most concrete reason. The goddess Saraswati presides over knowledge, wisdom, education and the arts. To step on a book or kick a musical instrument – or smash it onstage – is to directly disrespect and defile the goddess herself. (By the way, why do musicians smash their instruments on stage? Is it like a Shah Jahan kind of thing where no music can ever sound as good as it did in that moment? Because by that logic, the musicians should then be smashing themselves, right?)
I don’t like this explanation because it feels a bit isolating. As if someone who has no connection to Saraswati could never understand. But I still think of it as the simplest answer because it possibly gives people less of a reason to argue. However, regardless of religion – because it’s important to remember that being of Indian descent doesn’t always equate to being a Hindu – education, arts, and knowledge are valued in Indian culture.
Kicking, stepping on, or otherwise disrespecting that knowledge on purpose is not only hurtful, I’d say it’s a pretty clear reflection of someone’s character. Is there anything so terrible about having respect for knowledge? In theory, it shouldn’t be something that divides us, but rules about where and how we direct our bodies are nevertheless apt to do so.
If objects of learning are sacred, why do we usually talk about the bodies that made them in the context of offending or pleasuring others? Hands, feet, eyes, lungs, lips, shoulders, hearts, back, bums, genitals, thighs, wrists, intestines, foreheads, chests, the whole damn package. It’s a mosaic of different purposes, strengths, abilities and uses.
Having grown up female in the South Asian diaspora, there are a lot of rules and expectations connected to the body. Though it’s fair to say that every culture has ways of dictating how bodies should behave and often which is then often subject to different fusions across time and geography. In my experience, the expectation seems to be that your body must be some kind of mystical, east-west chimerical figure that has the ability to both fade into the background so as not to call attention to itself while simultaneously standing out as the gold standard in qualities ranging from to virtue, intelligence and education, to being a cultural representative.
It’s a lot of expectations to put on your body when the earliest messages are that our bodies are inherently wrong and offensive. Talking about bodies, I’m not just referring to the sexual aspect, although that’s the thing that as a girl, we were supposed to avoid at all costs. Your level of ignorance when it comes to sex must be so high that you almost behave as if you don’t have a body. Because drawing attention to it turns you into some kind of sexual aerosol spray, dispensing both a come-hither scent and the ruin and shame of your family.
As a little kid, my dad used to bring me back souvenir t-shirts from his business trips, always multiple sizes too big. ‘You’ll grow into them!’ was always his logic as the shirts I wore from Orlando, New Orleans, and Phoenix went to my knees. As a fully grown adult, people regularly lose track of me in groups of primary school children. Of course the real irony is that if my dad buys me a shirt now, it’s annoyingly my size, rather than my preferred over-sized.
Pre-puberty, you’re the darling of your male relatives. A little dolly to be snuggled and rewarded for your innocence. The moment puberty hits those same males treat you like you’ve contracted a contagious disease. You bleed every month while their bodily rules of conduct include a fear of being contaminated. They are unnerved by the thought and sight of a body crawling towards womanhood. In other words, it’s impossible to talk about South Asian bodies without implying the ‘sh’ word(s): shame/sharam.
Don’t sit with your legs open.
Go change, you’re showing too much skin.
It’s school, not a beauty contest.
This last argument has always led me to wonder if showing skin and splaying my legs equates to competition standards of beauty. It makes sense given the number of other bodily things that get carped about like skin lightness, facial and body hair, wrinkles, posture, size.
But this controlling of bodies isn’t just limited to beauty, although I could fill a lot of pages just talking about that. I saw a recent post from The Pink Ladoo Project in response to an article where a white mother shared her and her son’s weekly routine which included only showering two times a week. Not to be confused with the ‘nothing shower’ trend, this tradition of barely showering is backed by a surprising number of white celebrities, some of whom believe that waiting until your natural scent is unbearably foul is your body’s way of telling you it’s time to wash.
The overwhelming response amongst South Asians was something along the lines of, imagine if this were a trend started by a BIPOC person! While others shared their experiences of – despite daily showers – being bullied for ‘smelling of curry.’ It’s a smelly body paranoia that is carried into adulthood and leads people to fling open all windows when any kind of spices are being cooked.
At this point you might be wondering, how did we get from the TV show which gave us the important catchphrase ‘having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card!’ to…this? It’s a topic that becomes more confusing the older I get. If, culturally, we are taught to revere the texts and instruments and works of art that further our knowledge, why can’t we have the same reverence for our bodies which produce them?
I was well into my twenties when I discovered some of the bizarre powers a body can have. At a now defunct weekend festival in the neighborhood where I lived I was taking part in a quality control task, sampling gin and tonics from the different street stands. If you’ve also done this, you know that food is an important part of the job. It was a sweltering summer night and I was wearing an oversized t-shirt and a miniskirt. Tucked onto the steps of a darkened stoop my now ex-partner and I were gorging on pizza slices as big as our heads, reveling in the cheese pulls, when from somewhere from the depths of righteousness came striding, two of the cause’s most annoying soldiers.
The taller of the two proceeded to berate me loudly about my exposed legs, about the white man I was with, and about the beer beside me. When I think about this situation now, it’s hilarious. Why should these low-budget enforcers of women’s behavior scare me? I have looked into my mother’s eyes and asked to go to a sleepover. That’s scary. These guys were amateurs.
Then, from the shadows of a neighboring stoop rose a hulking figure over two meters tall and built like a Clydesdale horse. He was backlit by the sickly orange streetlights, so at first, all I could see were the silhouettes of very unseasonable combat boots and the round lines of a bald head. He walked into the puddle of light thrown from a nearby stand, my suspicions were confirmed by the large hammer of Thor swinging from his neck, and the tiny woman behind him with dyed blonde streaks and an arm and chest covered in tribal and nordic imagery.
When the righteous pair caught sight of the right wing pair, the former shot an expression of loathing in my general direction and slithered away into the crowd, presumably to get another drink. The right wing Clydesdale stopped in front of us, shooting his most aggressive glare towards where the morality brothers had made their escape.
‘Is there a problem?’ he asked me in German, with the air of someone who would really like there to be a problem.
After the moment of shock, the encounter had left me seething. But of course, this would be another case of having crafted the most searing responses hours too late and only getting to use them when recreating the scene in the shower and playing all the parts. I destroy them every time, including the Clydesdale, who instead of listening to me when I said I was fine, used the opportunity to start blathering to my white ex-partner about ‘those’ people coming into the country and having no respect for culture or women. It should be noted that his lady companion was also trying to enter the conversation, but clearly this stale, bullshit diatribe about plagues of migrants coming over to steal jobs was men’s talk.
After a few minutes of him spewing hot air, the Clydesdale glanced over at me as if finally remembering why he had faked a bout of chivalry. I tried to look him directly in the eye, exuding toughness while swigging my beer.
‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me as though speaking to a child. ‘In this country you’re free.’
And in my home, I thought to myself, you would not be allowed in unless you take off your boots first.