Aasif Mandvi on Ellis Island
by Sumita S. Chakravarty
Is there a comic vision of migration, or more precisely, a comedian’s take on the matter? We are so used to dark and gloomy images of migrants, to accounts of danger, violence, and death as far as the movement of people across borders is concerned, that there hardly seems space for alternative ways of looking and feeling in public visual culture. The very terms “migrant” and “refugee” have taken on connotations of poverty and hopelessness, hence a burden to society that must be avoided at all costs.
And yet, there is a strong and vibrant tradition of humor that immigrants have long brought into the cultures they have entered. Ghettoized as “ethnic humor” and hence separated from mainstream or more highbrow studies of comedy as a distinctive genre, they have taken many forms (newspaper cartoons, jokes, vaudeville routines, songs, poetry, musicals, film). American film historian Charles Musser identifies “role-playing” as a significant source of humor through which ethnic identities were examined in early cinema (although still mostly by WASP-dominated film companies).1 A play by the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (1908) was attended by President Theodore Roosevelt. The Marx Brothers and Eddie Cantor were Jewish performers who combined satire and sentiment in the portrayal of inter-ethnic love relationships.
But if early ethnic comic artists could address political realities only indirectly, the emergence of “satire tv” in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries with shows such as Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have provided space for new ethnic voices in comedy. In what has been called the post-network era, the “fake tv news” genre and standup comedy have seen the emergence of comic ethnic voices and personas such as Aasif Mandvi, Hari Kondabolu, Hasan Minhaj, John Oliver, and the latest sensation, Canadian female youtube artist, Lilly Singh. As though to address a more brutal politico-cultural environment in the post-9/11 world, as well as the affordances of “complex tv” (scholar Jason Mittell’s term), comedy of the Daily Show/ John Oliver variety has taken on the job of speaking truth to power – perhaps assuming its age-old function. Unlike earlier generations of immigrants, today’s voices such as Mandvi, John Oliver, and several others are sometimes highly critical of their adopted homeland — and they are popular!
Under these changed circumstances, what does it mean to be “an American” today? And what is the symbolic significance of Aasif Mandvi on Ellis Island? I suspect that many of us are drawn here by such questions. An event organized by the Zolberg Institute of Migration and Mobility at the New School in New York, my home institution, provides the occasion for the gathering. Inviting Mandvi seems like a stroke of genius: in 2019, at a time of harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and stringent border controls, the presence of Aasif Mandvi — comic actor and writer, a Muslim immigrant from Gujarat, India — on the protected and hallowed grounds of Ellis Island is at once imaginative and thought-provoking. (The other invited speaker was the distinguished philosopher-scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah. Because of my specific interest in exploring the intersections of media and migration, I have chosen to focus on Mandvi for this piece.)
Ellis Island at dusk is a beautiful sight, serene and majestic, lights shining from its “golden arched” pathway that leads to the great entrance hall. As the Miss New York Ferry nears the main building, having circled around the Statue of Liberty, there is excitement in the air, and my colleagues and I take the usual selfies against the backdrop of these iconic monuments. A hundred or so years ago, this place was abuzz with activity, as immigrant-carrying ships ceaselessly entered New York harbor and passengers lined up for approval to enter the United States. In all, 12 million people passed through Ellis Island between the years of 1892 to 1910, till it closed as an arrival port in 1954. The building is now a museum of immigration.
Mandvi’s presentation takes us back twenty years, to 1998 when, as he notes, there was no internet, and “facebook was a directive”: people were still reading books! He was not getting any roles, and so he decided to write a play in which he performed all six characters. The result was Sakina’s Restaurant, the story of an immigrant family from India who open a restaurant on Sixth Street in New York City. Mandvi presents an excerpt, alternately intoning the personas of the young nephew Azgi and his uncle, the restaurant owner whose angry comments are directed at his daughter, Sakina. The theme is cultural and inter-generational conflict, a staple of immigrant narratives across countries and groups. Sakina wants to go dancing while her father would rather that she help her mother in the kitchen; she is against her parents arranging her marriage and is dating “American boys”; she outrages her father through her choice of dress and her inability to speak in her native Gujarati; and she deludes herself into thinking that American society will accept her brownness, her difference. We hear the father’s rants, but not Sakina’s responses, except that she is in a hurry to get away. Mandvi ends with a parable: a man asks the gods for another face, and the wish is granted. But when he looks in the mirror, he no longer recognizes who he is.
If Sakina’s Restaurant is the product of an earlier cultural moment that may have passed, as the internet and social media have made it harder (or less desirable) to cordon off cultures from one another, it nevertheless seeks to remind audiences of the pain and sacrifice (not to mention the economic insecurity) involved in leaving the familiar behind and adjusting to a new place. While South Asian comic artists have based their humor on practices of linguistic and familial disenfranchisement, mimicking the “strange accents” of Indian English and the puritanical mindset of parents and uncles to comic effect, the idiom of radical disconnection and emotional anguish can remain elusive. Thus for some, there is no new America to be celebrated, no new narrative except the old one of constant work, social isolation, and diminishing ties with children and far-flung relatives.
In the Q & A session, the question came up as to whether indeed the new American narrative of immigration needs to focus on the idea of internal struggle within families and communities, replacing the one of the huddled masses arriving at Ellis Island to make good the American Dream. Mandvi mentions that for some, America does not live up to its promises, resulting in unhappiness and frustration.
I am a bit disappointed that Mandvi does not tell us much about his growth or aspirations as a comic writer-performer and his own sense of his “Americanness.” He noted that his excerpt had highlighted problems that are human and widely-shared: the gap between parents and children, the loss of cultural grounding, the need to belong. If a new narrative is indeed to emerge, the comedian’s attention to minutiae, to the local and granular, is a good attempt to point the way forward.
Reference
Charles Musser, “Ethnicity, Role-Playing, and American Film Comedy: From Chinese Laundry Scene to Whoopee (1894-1930) in Lester Friedman, ed. Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
On Venezuelan Migration: Sebatián Llovera’s Non-Linear Trajectories
by Elvira Blanco
By mid-2019, the number of Venezuelans to migrate since the beginning of the Chavista regime in 1999 has reached four million. The phenomenon increased dramatically over the past 4 years, with people fleeing food and healthcare shortages, violence, skyrocketing inflation, and abysmally low wages. The consequences are felt across Latin America, as countries of the region grapple with a ceaseless influx of migrants, many of them refugees. Meanwhile, in the background of the dramatic material consequences of this crisis, Venezuelan society is undergoing the process of conceiving itself, for the first time, as a migrant population. As a relatively prosperous petro-state, it was always on the receiving end of migratory movements––from Colombians displaced by the war to Peruvians and Ecuadorians fleeing collapsing economies, to Lebanese and Syrians and Italian, Spaniard and Portuguese peasants in the 1940s and 50s––; hence, the last two decades have seen the first mass emigration movement in Venezuelan history. A heated debate about how migration should take place and what it means rages on in traditional and social media today. The millions of migrants have also become the object of political disputes among the groups that compete for power. And as more people leave Venezuela, intellectuals and artists have also begun to address this new diasporic dimension of their culture. Many of them work from a migratory position themselves, or in precarious conditions in Venezuela, usually with no institutional funding.
Sebastián Llovera (Valera, Venezuela, 1992) resides in Caracas. A trained visual artist, he is interested in reading maps against the grain and using them as surfaces to be drawn on, bleached, and painted over. He describes his work with cartographic documents as “reinventing the notion of territory” and articulating the transformations left by the passing of time on charted terrains. He received the first prize in the 2019 Jóvenes con FIA Salon, perhaps the most important award for young Venezuelan artists, which was resurrected this year after a period of inactivity. Significantly, Llovera’s piece is titled Devices for nonlinear trajectories, and it consists of a mural installation of maps, cyanotypes and drawings that can be activated with an Augmented Reality app.
Well-known artists like Mexican Teresa Margolles and Argentine Marcelo Brodsky have recently addressed the movement of Venezuelans into Colombia. Margolles has created participative works with the migrants and those who help them, while Brodsky has referenced the striking view of a river of people crossing over to Colombia by foot along the Simón Bolívar Bridge. Rather than working at or with the border itself, Llovera chooses to deterritorialize his work completely. There is no presence of the familiar outlines of Venezuela or Colombia; these are uncanny and unspecific maps, painted blue and overlaid on each other. In his own words, Llovera “reverses” the original meaning of the maps: documents meant for orientation and scientific knowledge become opaque, the relational logic that binds them together hidden from the spectator.
The maps no longer work for their intended objective. Although this is a common trope in contemporary art, the gesture of refusing geographical specificity at a time when borders are so politically significant is strangely provocative. Llovera cannot escape his inclusion in the wider discussion on migration in Venezuelan art––the work, after all, is situated, produced inside Venezuela––but he can confer the debate with an aura of estrangement. What does this attitude of disaffection do?
Once one looks past the initial disturbance of deterritorialization, Devices for nonlinear trajectories can be compelling. It speaks about migration in a different way than is being done widely. The magnitude of the diaspora has inundated the Venezuelan imaginary with emotionally charged, on-the-ground images of the migrant process: how migrants live, what they bring with them, what they leave behind, how they behave. Llovera’s insistence on proposing indeterminate trajectories, with maps so devoid of human character and conventional usefulness that they can be scanned to reveal sound files in the Cloud, refers to the phenomenon of dispersion, the reorganization of things in space, the very instability of the migrant trajectory itself. For those who have lived it, after all, migration is indeed a meandering trajectory: getting around flight restrictions, exchange control and migratory bureaucracy are only some examples of the detours and delays of the process of leaving. As the crisis continues, Venezuelans must also face the path towards redefining their own identity, now dispersed and, indeed, nonlinear.
