

Scaachi Koul Wants to Make the Culture She Never Had

The author of One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter talks about Indian-Canadian womanhood.

Scaachi Koul is wearing leggings patterned with the face of an Indian woman. The repeating white face and black hair bears flashes of red from a bindi and the sindoor powder along her part. "Indian women on the street are like, hey, I know that woman on your butt," says Koul, smiling. Then she starts making fun of Dunkin' Donuts. She doesn't get why Americans are so obsessed with it. (She spends a lot of time making fun of Americans, and also making fun of Canadians.)

Koul's recently released book of essays, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, covers a lot of topics: womanhood, body image, growing up in Canada and on the internet, love, family. But the thread that ties these experiences together is her Indian-ness. It's what makes her struggles with body hair all the more loaded. It's what makes her relationships with white people more difficult to navigate. It just makes her experiences, well, different.

At least that's what I, a mixed-race Indian-American woman, see in it. It's not like women haven't grappled with rape culture and family dynamics in essay form before, but there's something about Koul's writing that, while universal, also feels like it's specifically for me. It centers the brown woman's experience. Yes, these are experiences that everyone has, but this is how they happen for women like her. And that's exactly what she meant to do.

Scaachi Koul

At your Greenlight Bookstore event, a cabal of brown girls showed up asking you for life advice. It was amazing. Does that happen to you often?

They come all the time. They come and they want advice, or an answer, and half the time I'm like, "I just don't have one! I don't know what's going to happen with you and your parents. I don't know if you're going to get disowned." It makes me sad, because it tells me just how little they get spoken to.

You said at that event that you wrote this book for brown girls. What do you think it is about the Indian-American or Indian-Canadian experience that's so hard for girls to navigate, or to live authentically in?

Women are reflected in media. Whether you like it or not, there's something shown back at you. And we're at a point right now where that's happening with South Asian artists. Riz Ahmed is some hot teen that everybody's horny for. Mindy's still got her show. Aziz has his show. It's kind of starting, but there isn't [so much] in the culture that speaks back to you. I couldn't think of anything from when I was younger, certainly.

I feel like I watched 'The Jungle Book,' that's it.

Right! I remember watching that too and feeling like, "Ahhh!" But that's what I mean, when it is reflected back to you, it's dumb. It's cartoony or fake, and insulting sometimes. When I was a kid, I felt so proud that Apu was a brown person on The Simpsons, and you grow up and realize that whole thing sucks. It's offensive and obnoxious, and it's turned half my upbringing into white people screaming Apu jokes at me.

So these girls come to these events because there's nothing else, and at least I'm visible, and they want to know, How do I get there? And, God...it's luck? I hate myself a lot, I drink too much—these are never the answers they want. But I get that. They'll come to me after and give me these details, and I feel a responsibility towards them. I don't want to leave them in the lurch, but I can't solve this. If I could, I would. I'm doing what I can by showing up and being there, but at a certain point, isn't it shitty that there are, like, five of us doing all this work?

It seems like people still can't grok a brown woman's narrative. People either latch on to the brownness or the womanness, and don't necessarily realize that for brown women you can't have one without the other. Have you experienced that in people's reactions to your book?

It's really difficult, and for the chapter about body hair I thought about this a lot. With hair, it's either something we talk about from a racial perspective or from a gender perspective, and it's different when we put the two together. Racially, it happens in different ways, too. Brown women get to have beautiful, admired hair—but on their heads, nowhere else. And black women just can't have hair? Nobody wants to let them do anything.

But part of it too is that the people who interview me tend to be white, because the media is white. I get a lot of women, but they're not sure how to talk about it. Actually, this may be more true with white male interviewers, but they seem scared to talk about my race, like it's a secret.

It's like they're worried they're going to say something weird about it.

But them being uncomfortable about it is worse. The other side of it is when people want to talk to me about the internet, and abuse on the internet. They only talk to me about it like, "As a woman it must be hard," and I'm like, Well...there's lots of reasons why it's challenging. And I'm getting off relatively lightly: I'm straight, I'm pretty middle class, I'm in a position with my job where I could just stop dealing with it, and not everybody gets to do that. But my brownness sometimes plays as big a role as my gender does, and it's complicated. That's not a pass—I'm not happy about it, but people just don't know how to talk about it. You're the first person who's asked me that.

I don't get to complain for just me.... I have to talk for a literal billion of us.

You also have that caveat of "other people have it worse," when you've had it really bad with harassment online! Why do you think you play that experience down?

I don't think I'm doing that, but it's worth acknowledging that there are levels to these experiences. People get mad at me when I call Canada bad. It's not great! But people ask what I'm mad about, because we have free health insurance and our hot, dumb president. It would be easy for me to say I'm comfortable. But saying that is dismissive. The abuse I get is bad, but it's the tip of an iceberg that gets bigger.

This is why I complain so much. I don't get to complain for just me. I have to talk for a literal billion of us, because there aren't enough of us who get to speak out.

I've noticed that brown women who don't really love the book leave reviews online saying, "I'm just glad this exists." I would love for us to be at a place where you could tell me you think it sucks because there's so much else around, but there isn't.

There's this great line in your essay "Fair and Lovely," where you say you used to not wear gold jewelry because it made you feel marked as an Other, and now you wear it as "a signal to other Others that I'm an other too." How did that shift happen?

I was in a position where I could arguably not acknowledge that part of my identity. I'm not that dark skinned. I could dye my hair and pluck my eyebrows and change the way I do my makeup, I could obscure it. But I got to a point where I realized I don't want to do that. I'm very stubborn, and I don't like the idea of running away from things that I feel are mine. By the time I was in my early twenties, I thought, Why do I not get to engage with these things because other people are uncomfortable with it?

There is something oddly comforting about [being recognized as part of a culture]. I'm not from anywhere: I'm not Indian by birth, or by anything beyond my parents' race. I was born in Calgary, but I hated it, so I'm not living there. If I don't feel like I'm from any of these places, I might as well try to own little bits of identity with how I present myself.

Have you had an experience before of not wanting Indian things until white people started using them? Because I definitely got excited about those chandelier earrings once they showed up on white celebrities, even though I already had them, and I'm so angry about that.

I'd like to curate who gets to reflect my image back to me.

I did Indian dancing, and you wear big jewelry, and one of the pieces I had was five rings that connected to a bracelet. And I remember thinking it was hideous and ridiculous at the time. But I started liking the idea of it because H&M started making something like it. I was like, "That's so cute! Why is it familiar?" And I talked to my partner about it when I got home, and he goes into my jewelry box and he's like, "This? This thing that your mother gave you 15 years ago?" It's maddening. On some level, you're just happy to be seen by anybody. And then you're like, no, I'd like to curate who gets to reflect my image back to me.

So, you wrote about the ridiculousness of Indian weddings, and now you're engaged. Are you having one?

Yeah. Maybe that'll be book two! Honestly, I have very little autonomy in this process, as I wrote in the book. We thought we had a date, and I told my mom, and she flipped out because it's a holiday. Like, what holiday? She just invented some Indian holiday where we can't eat meat.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below