Phoebe and her family in 1999. Image: Supplied
It’s 1999, and everyone’s partying like it’s my first birthday. My relatives from Bega, Wollongong, Melbourne and Singapore congregate in my Sydney home to celebrate one year of this new life. Nearly everybody takes a photo with me, my chubby body bouncing up and down on their legs until it’s time to say cheese. A fourth generation has begun, a generation that can be captured by one particular photo: I’m sitting on my Great Achi’s (great-grandmother) lap, with my dad and my Achi (grandmother) standing behind us. A perfect encapsulation of my Sinhalese family, whose lineage crosses countries and continents, from Sri Lanka to Malaysia to Singapore to Australia, at the tail end of the twentieth century.
My family is immortalised in photo albums from the first seven years of my life, before technology takes over in the mid-2000s. Last year, I ransacked these albums, having found myself suddenly overcome with nostalgia. In the middle of the album that documents my second year of life, I came across that multigenerational photo from my first birthday party. My eyes gravitated towards Achi’s face: She’s smiling down at me, undeniably proud of her first grandchild, and of her son for raising his daughter on the brink of the new millennium.
As a child, I knew so very little about this side of the family. My interactions with Achi were sparse and emotionless, and although she made an effort to care for me when she visited, she never revealed much of herself or her past, never openly spoke about her feelings or her politics. A highly secretive person, she seemed to live in a little world of her own. Still, as a young child I saw a bit of myself in her. I realise now that this was mainly superficial: she looked like me, in the same way that my dad looked like me.
Most of the gaps in my knowledge of Achi’s life were told to me later, in the eleven years following her death. My parents opened up about the ways in which she used to express her worldview and how she’d interact with others accordingly. Mum’s mentioned several times that when she and Dad started living together, Achi didn’t approve of it because they weren’t married at the time. I also learnt that she deemed the Labor Party ‘commies’ and was a stickler for cultural and religious conservatism.
When my parents were married, Achi insisted that they integrate Buddhist elements into their ceremony and that my dad’s cousins, much younger children whom he barely knew, be flowergirls and pageboys. They didn’t reject her requests, but as highly progressive individuals who had rebelled against the conservatism of their parents’ generation, they were confused by her stubbornness. Not to mention, Achi refused to invite the few queer members of the family to the wedding, or to have any kind of relationship with them outside of ceremonial formalities. I’ve since realised that these views were products of the patriarchal culture embedded into Sri Lanka’s history as a result of British and Portuguese colonisation.
In this period of time I didn’t just discover things about Achi’s life. I discovered things about my own. I am not the good little Sri Lankan girl Achi surely hoped I would become. I am queer, a feminist, a creative, without a conservative bone in my body.
When I remember Achi, who always used to symbolise my ties to brownness, to diaspora, I struggle to reconcile her prejudice with my capacity to feel proud of my roots.
It sounds morbid and selfish, but now, as a twenty-two-year-old queer woman, I find myself feeling glad that Achi never lived long enough to see me grow from girl to woman. She never got to experience my self-discovery alongside me. She wasn’t able to vote against my right to marry in 2017, nor hear of my coming out a year later.
It brings me great discomfort to look at my family—and by extension, my culture—through a negative lens. Because my dad, who grew up in Canberra, is so far removed from his culture, I always saw Achi as the representative for the Sri Lankan side of my family. I’ve since visited Singapore, her second home, several times where I’ve been able to connect more with South Asian society and culture.
Still, when I remember Achi, who always used to symbolise my ties to brownness, to diaspora, I struggle to reconcile her prejudice with my capacity to feel proud of my roots.
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I struggle to uphold Achi as a symbol of cultural pride. But I can find my pride through other people, other representatives of South Asian culture. One of my heroes is ALOK, a nonbinary and queer Indian-American writer and activist. They write and speak extensively about the intersections between race, culture, gender and sexuality, and as a baby queer who writes about similar topics, I take great inspiration from their work. But more than that, I take great inspiration from the ways in which they navigate their multiple, complex identities and work to feel proud of themself as a whole being.
ALOK’s story is different from mine, but I still find solace in it. Their website contains little, beautiful morsels of their life and family. Much of their writing muses on their relationship with their grandparents who, like my Achi, were South Asian. In a microessay, ‘My Achamma and her Gender’, they discuss with warmth and sincerity their love towards their Achamma (grandmother):
My achamma doesn’t know words like ‘transgender’ and ‘ally’ but she giggles and it feels like we are both laughing at a patriarchal system which never made space for our pleasure and our rage and our meaning.
As I read this, a rock of envy drops into my stomach. My Achi wouldn’t have known words like ‘transgender’ and ‘ally’ either, nor the words pertaining to my identity like ‘bisexual’ and ‘queer’. She wouldn’t have wanted to know them. She wouldn’t have wanted to laugh at the patriarchy; she would have wanted to help it stay upright.
What if I could tell her about the queer communities in South Asia, the activists who’ve reclaimed Pride events as citizens of countries wherein simply outing oneself can be life threatening?
But this rock of envy erodes and leaves in its place a dusting of wisdom. ALOK’s words make me realise that South Asian culture and queerness are not mutually exclusive. Although their Achamma didn’t understand every aspect of their identity, she apparently put in the effort to accept it. I’d like to think that were Achi alive today, I would have been able to talk to her about my queerness and slowly break down her prejudice. What if I could tell her about the queer communities in South Asia, the activists who’ve reclaimed Pride events as citizens of countries wherein simply outing oneself can be life threatening? What if I could tell her about the Hijras of India, the community of transgender women that has existed for over 4,000 years?
I’d hope that Achi would listen and learn that conservatism and heteronormativity are not all that define her culture. I can’t promise to myself that this would have happened, but imagining it as a possibility gives me comfort, that there is a place for me as a member of the South Asian diaspora.
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What makes a culture? Is it the impact of a country’s government on its society, its output of music and art, its food, its wine?
To me, culture is people: How they behave, how they establish customs and traditions, how they come together during periods of celebration or mourning. Each baby who is born will grow up to further their culture in some way, even if only for the mere fact of their existence. We learn about the wider world through the lens of our cultures, and eventually discover what our backgrounds mean.
My mistake was seeing Achi as the representative for my South Asian culture. A stranger asks me where I’m ‘from,’ and I reference her journey from Singapore to Australia, her marriage to my grandfather, as if she were the carrier of my ethnicity even after she died. I look in the mirror and see her face, her eyes, her smile. But the truth is, she and I are worlds apart. She revelled in tradition and status, while I prefer progress and acceptance. Her mind was riddled with homophobia, while I’ve had to fight against it.
I don’t always feel like I can claim my culture as my own, and maybe that’s why I relied on Achi for so long to claim it on my behalf.
I am as much a part of my family’s culture as Achi was, and sometimes I forget that. As a mixed race person, I don’t always feel like I can claim my culture as my own, and maybe that’s why I relied on Achi for so long to claim it on my behalf. But I am learning that no one can represent my identity, my connection to culture and colour, but me.
Culture is what you make of it—we mustn’t underestimate the art of interpretation. It is dynamic, ever growing, dependent on the choices of each person who belongs to it. My experience—and only my experience—of culture can inform my feelings towards it.
In October 2020, my feelings towards my culture and its intersection with my identity grew stronger. I read a story I’d written at a launch event for a Canberra-based queer and BIPOC collective I’m involved with. The story was about Achi, but it wasn’t really. It was a fictionalised version of Achi laced with optimism, an Achi that accepted me and connected with me. The keen eyes that watched me speak belonged to people like me, people who shared my struggles and my triumphs. They are my culture.
