Don’t Take Your Body to the West What an Indian Boy Learns ......Ted Nugent is known for saying and doing extreme things in ‘‘defense’’ of the Second Amendment’s right

Don’t Take Your Body to the WestWhat an Indian Boy Learns from the West(ern)in the Middle East

hari stephen kumar

Abstract What do the narratives of the West(ern) say about which bodies

are celebrated and which bodies are warned away in the West(ern)? And

how do such narratives echo globally while reinforcing American patterns of

racist violence against nonwhite bodies? In this autoethnographic cultural

analysis, I interweave songs and visuals with personal narratives of growing

up in the Middle East and with continued incidents of racial violence in

America. I seek to show how West(ern) ideologies celebrate a narrow kind of

white masculine vigilantism that affords most white people the luxury of

seeing themselves nostalgically and sympathetically portrayed as individuals

in West(ern) narratives while condemning members of nonwhite races as

collectively criminal.

Keywords: performance autoethnography, performative cultural politics,

racialization

Woke up this mornin’

Got yourself a gun

Mama always said

You’d be the chosen one

From ‘‘Woke Up This Morning’’ by Alabama 3 (1997)

* * *

He’s a boy, about 13 years old.

He’s got a plastic sword.

He’s coming at me, waving that sword over his head, yelling.

I’m about 10 years old.

We’re on a rocky hillside.

I’m scrambling backwards, trying to escape.

In the background are several other boys, all chasing me up the hill.

International Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall 2015, pp. 310–325.ISSN 1940-8447, eISSN 1940-8455. © 2015 International Institute for Qualitative Research,University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy orreproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website athttp://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/irqr.2015.8.3.310.

http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.

I’m wearing a long flowing robe, with buttons up the front.

They’re all wearing similar robes.

The slope is slippery with loose rocks and gravel.

I stumble and fall, on my back, looking up.

He’s close now, standing over me, yelling.

He raises the sword up high, brings it down in a swooping arc.

The edge of the sword flicks open the top button of my robe.

He shouts in triumph, blazing eyes locked onto mine.

Then he turns, runs down the hillside, chasing after his next target.

I sit up slowly.

I’m in Yemen.

It’s sometime around 1986.

The boys are my neighbors in an apartment complex in a dusty, hilly small town.

The apartment buildings tower beside me as I lay there on the slope.

I’m one of the few foreigners in these apartments.

But I’m a kid. And kids play.

And some games don’t need language.

Some games have a language of their own.

We’ve been playing the universal game of kill-the-Other.

* * *

He laughed and kissed his mom

And said your Billy Joe’s a man

I can shoot as quick and straight as anybody can

But I wouldn’t shoot without a cause

From ‘‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town’’ by Johnny Cash (1958)

* * *

These are the 1980s, and so Yemen during this time is the Yemen Arab Republic, and

it has only one TV station, which is run by the government and broadcasts only

during limited hours. One of the few TV shows aired every week is a popular his-

torical drama about the Crusades. Except this is the Middle East, and the drama is

produced by an Egyptian film company, so the drama is about the bravery and faith of

the Islamic warriors who fought back and repulsed the infidel hordes from Europe

who had the audacity to trespass on holy land. And so the Crusaders were the Bad

Guys, with darkened features and demonized behaviors, while the soldiers of Islam

were noble and eloquent. And so in the marketplace of this small town, most of the

DON’T TAKE YOUR BODY TO THE WEST 311

shops carry plastic toy swords, not the blunt greatswords of the Crusaders with their

massive cross-shaped hilts, but rather the sharp and slimly curved sabers of the

‘‘Saracens.’’

But these are also the ’80s, with globalization in full swing, so American cultural

imperialism is winning a different kind of global crusade. And so, even in the back-

water country that was the Yemen Arab Republic, in this hilly, dusty small town

called Taiz and nestled in the mountains far from the nation’s capital, the stereos in

cars and restaurants play songs by Madonna and Michael Jackson. And so, the

neighborhood video stores have shelves full of VHS and Betamax tapes of American

police thrillers and Westerns. And so, even the tiny convenience store near my

apartment building sells not just plastic swords but plastic six-shooters and plastic

handcuffs and plastic cowboy hats. And so when the neighborhood boys and I play

out on the hillside next to our homes, it’s usually some variant of ‘‘cops and robbers’’

or ‘‘cowboys and Indians’’ or ‘‘the faithful and the infidels.’’

But these are also the Cold War ’80s, with the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR, or

North Yemen) neighboring the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY, or

South Yemen). The PDRY is communist and closely allied with the Soviet Union,

which supplies much of the arms in South Yemen. The YAR is technically nonaligned

but has a historical enmity with PDRY, and there has been a low-scale border war

between North and South Yemen for a few decades. And both Yemens feature

a heavily armed populace, with a long-standing culture of guns and knives given

by fathers to young sons as soon as they hit puberty. Gun proliferation is rampant in

villages and towns across Yemen, so much so that a 2007 global survey ranks Yemen

second in gun ownership rates at about 55 guns per 100 people, bested only by the

United States at 88 guns per 100 people (Rogers, 2012). Yemeni boys and men also

traditionally wear a short, curved dagger called a jambiya around their waists (see

Figure 1), with a handle made of rhino horn. During these same 1980s, the prolifer-

ation of jambiyas in Yemen contributes heavily to the poaching and endangering of

rhino populations in Africa (Ellis, 2013). Thus, I grew up seeing young men wearing

both the jambiya and a sidearm around their waists (see Figure 2). Now, I’m sure that

during these years there are times when I’m playing with my fair share of plastic guns

and swords, I probably have a plastic cowboy hat and I’m probably pretending to be

a sheriff chasing bandits. But what I remember most about scenes like the one earlier,

with the older boy and the toy sword, is how terrified I am on a daily basis.

In moments like these, during games like these, I am not just a boy playing an

infidel trespassing on holy land—I am the Hindu infidel trespassing in a Muslim

country where I do not belong. In these moments, I am not just a boy playing at being

312 HARI STEPHEN KUMAR

a (native) Indian chased by (foreign) cowboys—I am the foreign Indian boy being

chased by natives. In these moments, I am not just a boy playing at being a criminal

who deserves the enforcement of law—I am the never-quite-legal immigrant who is

suspected whenever anything goes missing in the neighborhood.

* * *


Got yourself a gun

Mama always said


* * *

It’s the year 2013. The president of the United States, a black man, is addressing

a joint session of Congress for his annual State of the Union speech. This year, in one

section of his speech, he is mentioning measures to reduce gun violence, partly by

bolstering gun control laws. This year, in the audience are guests who have suffered

from gun violence, including family members of people killed by mass shooters. This

year, the commentary before and after the speech is overshadowed by the inclusion of

one particular guest, controversial rock musician Ted Nugent, a white man.

Figure 1. Yemeni boy wearing jambiya.

Source: Flickr user ‘‘rod_waddington,’’

photo taken February 2014.

Figure 2. Yemeni youth wearing jambiya and

pistol. Source: Flickr user ‘‘rod_waddington,’’

photo taken August 2013.


Ted Nugent is a guest of right-wing Congressman Steve Stockman of Texas.

Ted Nugent is also a board member of the National Rifle Association. Ted

Nugent is known for saying and doing extreme things in ‘‘defense’’ of the Second

Amendment’s right to bear arms, including brandishing assault rifles at his con-

certs frequently enough that photographs such as Figure 3 are common on the

Internet.

So, now, in February 2013, when Ted Nugent is invited to the State of the Union,

my newsfeed is filling up with articles featuring interviews with Nugent about his

opinions on gun control and Obama. Before the State of the Union, I read an article

with Nugent, when told that he cannot bring weapons into the Capitol, saying: ‘‘I will

go in at least 20 pounds lighter than I normally walk. I will be going in sans the

hardware store on my belt. I live a well-armed life, and I’ve got to demilitarize before

I go’’ (Peters, 2013).

Figure 3. Ted Nugent with rifle at a concert. Source: Flickr user ‘‘David Defoe,’’ photo

taken June 2007.


And afterward, I read about how a large crowd of reporters gather at a press

conference for Nugent’s response to Obama’s speech, when Nugent says: ‘‘I even

turned in my knife. I feel like a little girl. I’d have to protect you with the leg of that

table if something were to happen. I do have my flashlight. It feels unnatural’’ (Allen

& Nocera, 2013).

And I wonder. I wonder how the NRA would respond if a Yemeni-American

musician wore a dagger and brandished an assault rifle at a concert and said things

about living a ‘‘well-armed life’’ and defending his Second Amendment rights.

I wonder how the vast majority of mass shooters in America are young white men

and yet their narratives are framed as individual tragedies, while the tragedies of

young black and brown men are framed as collective racial criminality. I wonder

how I, a ‘‘naturalized’’ American, will always already be an Indian.

* * *





* * *

On a cold night in February 2012, a young African American teenager named

Trayvon Martin leaves his father’s home in a gated community in Florida to go buy

Skittles and a bottle of iced tea at a neighboring 7-Eleven convenience store. As he

makes his way back home through the gated community, he is talking on his cell

phone with his girlfriend. A chilly drizzle has set in; Trayvon is wearing a hooded

sweatshirt with the hood up against the rain. A white Hispanic man named George

Zimmerman is a resident of the same community and is driving by on his way home

from errands when he spots Trayvon walking slowly along.

Trayvon Martin is unarmed.

George Zimmerman is carrying a 9mm semiautomatic pistol.

. . .

In the next few crowded minutes, several things happen.

. . .

Zimmerman accosts Trayvon, causing Trayvon to run away in the dark.

Zimmerman calls the police to report Trayvon as suspicious.

Zimmerman runs after Trayvon.

The police ask Zimmerman to stop chasing Trayvon.


Zimmerman accosts Trayvon again on a sidewalk near some apartments.

Zimmerman and Trayvon get into a physical altercation.

Zimmerman fires his gun at Trayvon at close range.

Trayvon collapses and dies of a single gunshot wound to the chest.

Trayvon dies within 70 yards of his father’s home.

. . .

During the next few crowded months, several more things happen.

. . .

Zimmerman is taken into custody briefly, and then released.

Zimmerman claims Trayvon had him pinned to the concrete sidewalk.

Zimmerman claims he shot Trayvon out of self-defense.

A national outcry results in growing pressure to prosecute Zimmerman.

Almost two months later, Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder.

Zimmerman pleads not guilty based on Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws.

. . .

And throughout the crowded year that follows, even more things happen.

. . .

Ted Nugent’s appearance at the State of the Union in February 2013 is almost

a year after Trayvon was killed. In mid-2013, Zimmerman’s trial begins and rapidly

shifts into a trial of Trayvon’s character instead. The jury is composed of six women,

five of whom are white and one is Hispanic. Zimmerman’s defense team releases

several pictures of Trayvon Martin taken from his cellphone to depict Trayvon as

a violent young man. One of them shows Trayvon shirtless, showing off his muscular

pecs.

Zimmerman’s attorney Mark O’Mara shows Trayvon’s shirtless picture to the

(predominately white, all women) jurors, juxtaposing it with pictures of menacing

young African American men (see Figure 4).

Mark O’Mara then proceeds to bring a chunk of concrete into the courtroom and

hefts it in front of jurors to show how heavy it is (see Figure 5).

While doing this, he says the following, dramatically and slowly:

Now that’s cement. That is a sidewalk.

And that is not an unarmed teenager

with nothing but Skittles, trying to get home.

That was somebody

who used the availability

of dangerous items


Figure 4. Zimmerman defense attorney Mark O’Mara shows women jurors a picture of

a shirtless Trayvon along with a picture of a robbery suspect. Source: AP/Joe Burbank.

Figure 5. Mark O’Mara hefts concrete in courtroom during closing arguments on July 12,

2013. Source: NBC News.


from his fist to the concrete

to cause great bodily injury

against George Zimmerman.

And the suggestion by the state

that that’s not a WEAPON?

that that can’t HURT somebody?

that that can’t cause GREAT bodily injury?

is disgusting (‘‘Attorney uses cement prop in Zimmerman trial,’’ 2013).

[Pauses. Takes slow sip of water.]

On July 13, 2013, the jury declares Zimmerman not guilty on all counts.1

* * *


Got yourself a gun

Mama always said


* * *

I’ve been interweaving the lyrics to the song ‘‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town’’ by

Johnny Cash (1958) with the song ‘‘Woke Up This Morning’’ by UK band Alabama 3

(1997). The latter song was described by band members as being an ode to female

empowerment (‘‘Revolutionary Stomp – Backstage with Alabama 3,’’ 2010) inspired

by the real-life story of Sara Thornton, an Englishwoman who was sentenced to life

imprisonment in 1996 for stabbing and murdering her abusive husband in 1989.

Ironically, the Alabama 3 song became popular in the United States as an ode to

violent masculinity when it was featured as the intro theme song for the mafia crime

TV series The Sopranos.

In May 2012, Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old African American woman, was

sentenced in Florida to 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot into the wall of her

house after a violent physical assault by her abusive estranged husband, who had just

threatened to kill her. She pleaded not guilty under the same Stand Your Ground

laws in Florida that would later be used by the Zimmerman defense. However, she

was charged and prosecuted (for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon) by the

same Florida state attorneys who prosecuted Zimmerman. The jury returned a guilty

verdict after just 15 minutes of deliberation.

And so in the weaving of song and story, in the flow between the West(ern) as

motif and West(ern) as ideology, I’m feeling the crux of how Bryant Keith Alexander


(2012) channels Jane Tomkins to describe Westerns as ‘‘a shaping of emotional lives

. . . that for me offers and promotes a verisimilitude between the reel life of the

characters on the screen and the real life of audience members; choices made and

choices to be made’’ (p. 471).

I’m feeling the ways that the reality of our emotional lives in the American West,

for me and for so many Othered others, are continually shaped by the motifs of the

imaginary American Wild West(ern), with its peculiar gun-centered/phallus-powered

emphasis on violence, masculinity, and white supremacy. And, as Durell M. Callier

(2012) says, ‘‘under White Supremacy our histories are fraught with moments of

solidarity, complacency, and cooperation in each other’s subordination’’ (p. 503).

So I’m feeling these motifs show up just about every day, with a fresh (and, really,

not-so-fresh) new (and, really, not-so-new) news story about systemic violence

against black and brown folks in America. Each story

splays opens [my] emotional and experiential lives . . . relative to westerns and

western motifs in ways that force [me] to see again and read again what is

sometimes constructed as ‘‘just movies’’ or ‘‘just stories,’’ to see the emotional

and political investments to which these [news events] narrate and script; as

both imaginative escapism and crushing cultural documentations/promotions

of ways of seeing and knowing the world that foreground particular lives and

erase others. (Alexander, 2012, p. 471)

So I’m feeling my presence, as a brown and bearded straight male, placed under

suspicion and categorization but also tensive with the pushes and pulls of masculi-

nities and femininities as these stories become lived moments in my everyday con-

versations with friends and family.

I’m feeling how hips and rage play out so differently in stories and songs involv-

ing straight white male bodies, where they are celebrated and exaggerated, such as in

the gun on the hips of Billy Joe, Ted Nugent’s bragging about the hardware on his

belt, and the exaggerated swagger of the police officer who strokes his fingers along

his metal-studded leather waist filled with so many steel tools of violence. And how

these postures are framed not as overly fearful defensiveness but as justified readiness

for rage against any threat, perceived or real. And how these postures are simply not

afforded to black and brown bodies.

* * *






* * *

It’s August 2014. My newsfeed is filled with stories of young Michael Brown in

Ferguson, Missouri. An 18-year-old unarmed black teenager, gunned down by white

police officer Darren Wilson after an altercation that began with the officer accosting

Michael and his fellow unarmed black teenaged male friend for their crime of walk-

ing down a quiet residential street while black.

And I’m wondering about the necessity of the phrase ‘‘unarmed black teenager.’’

And I’m wondering about how yet another black mother’s tears will fail to move the

stubborn determination of whiteness in American culture to paint all black males as

criminals. Whether it’s Sybrina Fulton (Trayvon’s mother) or Lesley McSpadden (Michael

Brown’s mother) or Marissa Alexander, whiteness in America works to dismiss their tears

while painting them as colluders in black criminality. Indeed, in researching this very

article, when I searched on Google for ‘‘Sybrina Fulton,’’ Google presented me with

a dropdown list of the most popular search terms based on what other people had typed,

and the very first term on the list was ‘‘Sybrina Fulton criminal record’’ (see Figure 6).

Meanwhile, songs such as ‘‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town’’ paint a sympathetic

portrait of white mothers and the rage of their young white sons as primarily indi-

vidual tragedies unconnected to their race. As Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2010)

describes in his book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making

of Modern Urban America, such a process has a long history in America’s systematic

approach to racializing crime and terror. Muhammad shows how between 1890 and

1940 the vast majority of white criminologists and sociologists used racially biased

crime statistics to depict African Americans as inherently criminal while discounting

or humanizing similar crime patterns by European immigrants and working-class

whites. Thus arose the long-standing pattern of ‘‘racial criminalization: the stigma-

tization of crime as ‘black’ and the masking of crime among whites as individual

Figure 6. Google search suggests most popular terms used by people looking for information

on Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton. Screenshot taken by me on August 26, 2014.


failure’’ (p. 3). Muhammad quotes Thorsten Sellin, one of the few white criminolo-

gists who spoke strongly against this practice, who in 1928 wrote:

In the case of the Negro, stranger in our midst, all beliefs prejudicial to him aid

in intensifying the feeling of racial antipathy engendered by his color and his

social status. The colored criminal does not as a rule enjoy the racial anonymity

which cloaks the offenses of individuals of the white race. The press is almost

certain to brand him, and the more revolting his crime proves to be the more

likely it is that his race will be advertised. In setting the hall-mark of his color

upon him, his individuality is in a sense submerged, and instead of a mere thief,

robber, or murderer, he becomes a representative of his race, which in its turn is

made to suffer for his sins. (Muhammad, 2010, p. 2)

That practice continues today, as ‘‘in all manner of conversations about race—from

debates about parenting to education to urban life—black crime statistics are ubiq-

uitous [but] white crime statistics are virtually invisible, except when used to dra-

matize the excessive criminality of African Americans’’ (Muhammad, 2010, p. 1).

So, I’m not surprised by the building narrative around Michael Brown’s criminality.

I’m not surprised by the growing support for the white officer’s actions. I’m not

surprised by the shift in media coverage to the ‘‘problem’’ of violence in ‘‘troubled’’

communities such as Ferguson that have a majority of African American residents, many

in poverty, while the local police and town government is dominated by white people.

In the coming days, I will not be surprised by renewed calls to white vigilantism by the

National Rifle Association, which has long waged a gun rights campaign that is saturated

with thinly veiled white supremacist rhetoric. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, promotes

its ‘‘Neighborhood Watch’’ services through flyers such as the one shown in Figure 7,

which was distributed by the KKK chapter in Springfield, Missouri (Clifton, 2013).

Martha Rosenberg (2013) traces the explicit racism in the NRA’s messaging, such

as the visuals in a 2007 fund-raising brochure titled Freedom in Peril, which ‘‘shows

Figure 7. KKK flyer distributed in Springfield, Missouri, in 2013. Source: Clifton, 2013.


an Aryan nation under siege by African-Americans and ‘illegal alien gangs’ of darker

peoples and homeowners defending themselves . . . by shooting from rooftops.’’

Figures 8 and 9 show representative pages from the brochure.

And so when I hear the refrain in ‘‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,’’ I can’t help

but feel, in my body, the ways that the tropes of the Western continue to echo today

in celebrating a certain kind of white masculine vigilantism.

I can’t help but feel, in my body, my breath catching sharply in pain every day

with yet another news article, how white men are afforded the luxury of reflecting,

perhaps with some nostalgia, on the tale of Billy Joe as an individual tragedy while

a very different song continues to play out in popular white American culture when it

comes to the tales of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

I can’t help but feel, in my body, taken back to a slippery and rocky hillside as

a young boy in Yemen, that the Western ideologically underpins the reasoning by

which a white defense attorney could claim that an ‘‘unarmed black teenager’’ was

indeed armed simply by being a black male standing on a piece of ground that could

become ‘‘dangerous’’ in his arms.

I can’t help but feel, in my body, as an unarmed brown and bearded homeowner

walking slowly and warily through my predominately white middle-class

Figure 8. Pages from Freedom in Peril, a 2007 NRA brochure. Source: Rosenberg, 2013.


neighborhood to get my mail, how the moral ground of laws such as ‘‘Stand Your

Ground’’ are built on the rhetorical tropes of Westerns where cowboys defend white

homesteads against Indians.

I can’t help but remember, in my body, as a young Indian boy growing up

watching Westerns in the Middle East, how powerfully the Western imprinted its

non-too-subtle message on me halfway around the world, that if you are not white,

boy, don’t bring your body to the West.

Acknowledgments

I thank my brothers Claudio Moreira and Bryant Keith Alexander for their presence inmy life and for creating livable spaces for so many of us in the academy. I thank my

supportive family of qualitative researchers at the annual International Congress ofQualitative Inquiry for always inspiring hope as we write and perform ourselves in

radical solidarity toward decolonizing the academy.

Figure 9. Illustration of ‘‘gangs’’ from Freedom in Peril, a 2007 NRA brochure. Source:

Rosenberg, 2013.


Note

1. I have written more extensively about the Zimmerman verdict in the context of under-standing American racism more broadly (kumar, 2013).

References

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http://www.forwardprogressives.com/coming-soon-to-your-town-the-kkk-is-recruiting-for-their-neighborhood-watch-program/http://www.forwardprogressives.com/coming-soon-to-your-town-the-kkk-is-recruiting-for-their-neighborhood-watch-program/http://www.forwardprogressives.com/coming-soon-to-your-town-the-kkk-is-recruiting-for-their-neighborhood-watch-program/http://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/thorny_issues/tackling_the_demand_for_rhino_hornhttp://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/thorny_issues/tackling_the_demand_for_rhino_hornhttp://www.lookleftonline.org/2010/12/revolutionary-stomp-backstage-with-alabama-3/http://www.lookleftonline.org/2010/12/revolutionary-stomp-backstage-with-alabama-3/

About the Author

hari stephen kumar is a Ph.D. student in English, with a focus on rhetoric and composition, atthe University of Massachusetts Amherst. He lives and loves and labors toward decolonizingthe teaching and performing of academic knowledge production. He can be reached [email protected].


Documents

Don’t Take Your Body to the West What an Indian Boy Learns ......Ted Nugent is known for saying and doing extreme things in ‘‘defense’’ of the Second Amendment’s right