Desi Making Waves

By Elaine G. Flores

Bridging the Gap

Filmmaker Valarie Kaur Brings a Message of Unity

Before you sit down to chat with Valarie Kaur—a young woman who devoted five years to the 2006 movie Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath, a post-9/11 documentary sparked by a hate crime; an Ivy Leaguer, who serves as a co-founding director of the Discrimination and National Security Initiative at the Harvard Pluralism Project and someone whose arrest at a 2004 protest rally led to years of chronic pain as a result of police brutality—you accurately anticipate what she will be like: strong, serious, intelligent. What you don't expect is the bubbly, breathless rapid-fire OMG delivery of stories punctuated with frequent giggles, the sort of light-hearted, girly aura that makes you imagine that when she needs a break from fighting the good fight, you could invite her over to do each other's nails during a Project Runway marathon.

She zigzags through an array of topics from her love of dogs—especially Labradors—to theology to how she persuaded her father, a lifelong Republican, to make 109 phone calls urging voters to support Barack Obama's presidency bid.

Kaur’s accessible demeanor, infectious enthusiasm and high energy, no doubt, come in handy as the third-generation Sikh-American tours the country showing screenings of her film and educating school students on Sikhism and issues of identity and social justice. Her speaking tour's theme can be summed up by the film's tagline: "In a world divided into us and them, who counts as one of us?" Kaur’s diverse audiences range from the mostly black kids at Tubman Middle School in an economically bleak part of Augusta, GA to the mostly white, middle-class teens at an all-girls Catholic school, the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield, MI, where as she recounts on her blog, Into the Whirlwind, a girl says: "This is the first time I've heard of the Sikh religion. Why?"

To understand the drive, complexity and free-thinking of Kaur, who received her Master’s degree in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and is now studying law at Yale, you have to start with her family. No seriously, you have to start with her family. It's a subject she rhapsodizes about, lovingly describing her parents as "beautiful people. Gorgeous, kindhearted, humble." Kaur, who has started to write down these tales, takes the listener on an epic tour of her ancestry, explaining, "I am who I am because of them."

There is her paternal grandfather, right out of a Steinbeck novel. We'll call it East of East of Eden. He sailed from Punjab to America by steamer ship in 1913 and farmed the Central Valley of California during the time of the Asian Exclusion Act, which prevented him from owning land or even returning to India to look for a wife for fear that he wouldn't be allowed back into the United States. He slept in barns and toiled for pennies a day. Years later, when World War II broke out and his Japanese neighbors were rounded up, he visited them in the detention camps and watched over their land. He also joined a group of North Americans fighting to break the British Empire's hold on India. "My father says that's where I get my revolutionary spirit," Kaur shares.

In the early 1950s, when he was in his 50s and free to travel to his native country for a wife, he met Kaur's grandmother, a divorcée in her 20s, who had fled an unhappy arranged marriage. The social constraints were such that her friends committed suicide to escape similar situations and Kaur's grandmother seriously considered jumping into a well until she felt a breeze that Kaur attributes to divine intervention. Shortly after, she met the farmer, 30 years her senior, from Clovis, California and they tied the knot, much to the dismay of her friends and family, who gloomily predicted that she'd never be able to have children with such an "old" man. She proved them wrong, four times over.

Kaur’s maternal grandfather, born in a village in Punjab that is now on the Pakistani side, was a mechanic in the British Indian Army during World War II. Kaur recounts: "There was very little water. Some of his fellow Sikhs cut their hair. He was asked why he didn't just cut his hair for health reasons and wear a helmet. My grandfather responded, 'But Sir, my hair is my helmet.'" The war vet lived through the bloody Partition of India, eventually moving to Clovis. "Your autobiography begins before you're born. My autobiography begins with these two men," says Kaur, "I'm very connected to my family's deeply American roots, but I have this deep sense of my ancestral roots in India."

Kaur also speaks often of her father, who became a marine biologist. She paints him as quite a colorful character. "He visited India for the first time at age 27 to find a wife. He spent his life assimilating into the very white, very conservative, very Christian Clovis. He did not know the protocol. He went to India wearing his Indiana Jones hat—and this was before the movies. He would walk in and tell them, 'I don't think this is going to work,' right there in the living room and making these girls cry. My mom was a college-educated city girl. Her family was modern. She said, 'There is no way I'm going to walk into this room carrying a tray of tea. I'm not going to be put on display.' So the tea was already on the table when my father arrived. He asked to speak to her privately and she says, 'Don't you feel bad coming to this country and breaking these young girls' hearts?' Two weeks later they were married. My mom was 18."

Twenty or so minutes into the conversation, we finally get to Kaur, who was born in 1981. She and her little brother grew up on the family land, which at that point was no longer a working farm. She remembers running around the peach, plum and almond trees and racing through strawberry fields. "I'm getting nostalgic thinking about this. When I go back home now, all of our land has been sold. The cows are gone. The orchards are gone. It's all Starbucks and Wal-Marts," she says.

Nostalgia aside, it wasn't an uncomplicated childhood for Kaur, who writes and speaks about what it means to be "in-between." "The other Sikh kids at the Gurdwara spoke Punjabi. I spoke very little. They had Sikh names, and I was named Valarie because I was born on February 14. I didn't fully belong with the Sikhs," she recalls. Nor did she seamlessly fit in outside the temple. "At school, I went through an incredibly painful series of events. My best friends and teachers tried to convert me to Christianity. They quite earnestly thought it was for my own good that they 'save' me. "

Kaur tells this story without even a trace of bitterness creeping into her voice and even manages to laugh at the traumatic memory. That's in keeping with a philosophy that she shares in classroom lectures: "Feel the pain. Go to the love. Create something."

She says, "I crafted myself in a way that I never would have, unless I was confronted with religious conversion." Kaur ended up embracing her Sikhism and developing a point of view built on her faith. "The heart of the Sikh religion is oneness. There's a word [seva] that means service...Liberation and salvation does not lie in the afterlife, it's found here and now, through service. I fell in love with the study of religion and this call to social justice as a way to approach conflict in the world...All my life I thought I was in an in-between space. Finally, I found that I can be a bridge."

That bridge has spanned some vast divisions. A young, black man moved by her stories of discrimination against Sikhs, unknowingly echoed the long-ago words of the war vet grandfather who refused to cut his hair, saying, "My braids are my turban." Kaur notes, "I've met Evangelical Christians who said, 'You and I have a lot in common. I've also felt like an outsider.' I've met gay men who feel the same way."

"By putting our stories out there, we can effect change. We've been shaped by the world, but in turn, we have the power to shape the world."

Kaur continues spreading the message. With the seventh anniversary of September 11th approaching, there's a month-long campaign to bring Divided We Fall into local communities. To find locations of the screening tour, learn how to help the film reach a wider audience by making a donation or get information on the upcoming DVD release, visit www.dwf-film.com.

For more on Valarie Kaur, check out her blog at valariekaur.blogspot.com.

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