my grandmother and obama

My grandmother doesn't speak English.  But she does watch CNN, and in the last several weeks of this election, she has been an avid consumer of tv news.  She used to watch Pakistani TV on a satellite channel, but lately, she's only interested in American election news.

A few days ago she said to me in Gujarati, "zara Obama lagao nay."  Which roughly translates to, will you put some Obama news on.  Not just news, but Obama news!

She knows a remarkable amount about the election considering that she doesn't  speak English.  Yesterday, when I was walking home, I gave her a call to let her know I was on my way.  She told me, it would be nice if you could hurry up a little.  I think they're saying Obama's numbers are down. When I got home she grilled me at length about polls.  My grandmother has an amazing capacity to fret... mostly about the safety and well-being of her children and grandchildren.  Lately, she has been devoting this fret-power to Obama's electoral prospects.

I asked her yesterday why she likes him so much.  To my surprise, she talked about when she visited Zanzibar (now Tanzania) for a few months in 1951.  She said there were lots of Arabs in Zanzibar then, and also lots of South Asians.  And the British- it was part of the British empire.  And she remembered that among these groups, the black Africans were the most impoverished and oppressed.  So it made her want to root for the black man standing for the U.S. presidency.

She isn't American, and she isn't formally educated-- two reasons she knows very little about the civil rights movement and detials about racial inequality in the United States (though of course, she does know that there is inequality).  So it was cool to see her reach back into her memory and into history to connect an Obama presidency to a time and place that she does know about.

It also shows how much people from opposite sides of the globe, really from two different worlds altogether, can have in common when it comes to their basic ideals about society.  She was born in 1921 in a village in India and has spent most of her life in India or Pakistan.  She didn't use telephones until she was an adult.  But the basic philosphy behind her support for Barack Obama is basically identical to that of someone born and raised in the United States decades later.

Comments

[batul]

This is a great post. It made me smile several times, and then sit back and wonder.