Dear Brown Girls

Iza and Dia are back with our (cold) hot takes about Indian Matchmaking season 2. Spoiler alert: the show has definitely gotten worse! Seema Aunty is back again taking the country by storm, arranging meetups (settle for 70% of what you want, please), styling up parties, and throwing stank face when things don't go her way. We come back to a cast of familiar characters (which... why?) and whole host of new ones to watch awkwardly search for love with the help of India's best matchmaker. 

Its been a busy summer, and we've got some exciting life updates to share with you that will make even the aunties rejoice!

Delve into the weeds about the particular relationship brown women can have with beauty and their own bodies. We're hairier than we expected (looking at you, rogue chin hair), plagued with permanent under-eye bags or bi-coloured lips, and grew up taking oily slicked-back braids to school.  Sometimes it feels like a lot. We chat about learning to love our own beauty, and recontextualizing it with our own standards rather than others, and embracing the cultural traditions of beauty that we've inherited. (But not the bad ones! Looking at you, colourism!)

Do your parents also keep all their savings in gold? When asked what they have saved for the future, they respond, "Well, that's what you're for, aren't you?" Iza and Dia dig into what it's like growing up as an immigrant, and how that has affected our relationship with money as adults. We ask deep-hitting questions like, "Why do I feel bad buying something for full price?" and "Is it normal to want to keep all your money under your bed?" At the end, we tell you how you can bid for our new, unique, one of a kind NFT! Just joking, what's an NFT?

This episode Iza and Dia dig into our experiences moving out (temporarily or for good) and braving the dangers that come with it. Namely, actually moving out, and telling your parents you're moving out -- both equally treacherous. There's judgy brown realtors, carbon monoxide poisoning, and of course parental disappointment -- what more could you want?

In this month's episode, we sat down to discuss Netflix's Al-Rawabi School for Girls. If you haven't seen it, go watch it now! Both beautiful and dark, it follows the lives of school girls in Jordan, and leaves much to be discussed about friendship, trauma, and where the lines of justice and vengeance blur. Note: This episode contains spoilers. 

Welcome back to Dear Brown Girls, season 2! We're back and more tired than ever! 

In this episode, we look back at what it's been like to create a podcast in the midst of a pandemic. We talk remote podcasting and editing woes (this is the first episode we've recorded in person!), our favourite and least favourite episodes of the first season, and what it's been like to do collaborations with the amazing brown women we've met because of the podcast! We rope that into how both our lives have changed in drastic and different ways because of the coronavirus pandemic, with Dia moving to work from home (forever? when will this end?) and Iza's work as a nurse more contentious than ever before.

You’ve all heard about the infamous Indian Soap Operas, but prepare to learn about a different, yet equally troubling, industry. Pakistani soap operas, or "dramas" as they're so lovingly called, are equal parts addicting and horrifying. While the endless emotional blackmail and the weird cousin romances might be fun to watch, there's something uncomfortable simmering beneath the surface. If art reflects reality, what kind of truths can we learn about our culture from these spiralling stories? Is there a deeper problem here? Or did Dia and Iza have a 50 minute hissy fit for no reason?

How much internalized racism do we really carry with us? This episode we cringe at the ways that we internalized racism as children and even as adults, the line between criticizing your own culture and attacking it, as well as why we learn to desire validation from white people. We then map out steps to free ourselves from internalized racism, and because we like baby steps, we'll start by taking back our own names. 

Dia's Book Recommendations

Here's a few books I recommend if you want to read books by people of colour. I've made an effort to include different genres, as well as stories of both the diaspora and those in the motherland. Share your book recommendations to us @_dearbrowngirls!

I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai (Autobiography / Activism)

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi (Graphic Novel / Autobiography)

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (Postcolonial Classic)

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri (Short Story Collection)

We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (Essays on Feminism)

The Arrival - Shaun Tan (Graphic Novel / Immigration)

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors - Sonali Dev (Romance)

Akata Witch - Nnedi Okorafor (Children's Fantasy)

Pachinko - Min Jin Lee (Multigenerational Epic)

Why Not Me? - Mindy Kaling (Comedy / Autobiography)

Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih (Postcolonial Classic)

*Addendum from Dia: I mentioned that reading in your native language can be mentally freeing because you aren't consuming the Western and colonial ideologies that are baked into languages like English. But that's only a privilege you have if you know your mothertongue or are able to learn it. Reading books in translation are a wonderful alternative that still maintains Eastern ideas and worldviews. Not everyone butchers "translations" like Coleman Barks did to Rumi. Furthermore, there's also power in colonized/brown/black voices taking the language of their oppressor and repurposing and subverting it to tell our own stories -- and that's why many of the books I've recommended here are books written natively in English. 

This isn't a universal brown trait, but we felt remiss not to discuss the elephant in the room: Dia is Indian while Iza is Pakistani. The conflict between the two countries has been a lifelong constant for both of us. Whether the countries are going to war or facing off during a cricket match, their rivalry is well documented and going strong. In this episode, we dive into our theories as to why partition happened, try our hand at British accents (spoiler: they’re outrageously bad), and examine how its legacy continues to affect us to this day.

Disclaimer: We’ve marked this episode explicit due to liberal amounts of cursing, rage, and offensive British accents. You've been warned!

It's February 2021, and we’re still in lockdown. So join Dia and Iza as they reminisce about better times, grieve over trips that could have been, and swap travel stories. More importantly, tune in to learn how to trick your brown parents into letting you travel and escape the “you can travel when you’re married” trap.

If there's one universal experience that all brown girls can relate to, it's the suffering we all face at the hands of our beloved Aunties. You can run, you can hide, but none of us escape unscathed. In this episode we dramatically delve into our aunty traumas, and try to finally move past the horrific experiences they put us through, and discuss how we can avoid becoming the aunties we love to hate.

Whether it’s questions about if you’re bald under there, or being asked why you’re not wearing it the right way, people brown and not brown just won’t leave a hijabi alone. This episode, we uncover (hahah sorry) the realities of wearing a hijab day to day in face of modest fashion, ignorance, and societal expectations, and what it’s actually like to be the woman inside.

Welcome to the first episode of our podcast, where we over-explain ourselves and try to make a point or two. In this episode, we discuss how hard it is to be a brown woman in this day and age, and what a shitty job the media does representing women of color. Mostly it’s just us gushing about our love of Mindy Kaling, ranting about how badly hijabis are depicted on TV, and begging the haram police not to come for us. We promise it only gets better from here (because it can't get worse).