How I Became More Than Just the Butt of an Ugly Joke

How I Became More Than Just the Butt of an Ugly Joke
Essay by author Priyanka Taslim 

We are so excited to feature author Priyanka Taslim's essay about her experiences as a Bengali author. Read below and check out the end to see where you can purchase her new book, The Love Match

How I Became More Than Just the Butt of an Ugly Joke
Kids (and adults), I’m going to tell you an incredible story: the story of the first time I saw a Bangladeshi character in western media. It was 2005, and I was fourteen or so, a geeky kid who loved stories as much then as I do now—in books, in movies, on television. Having just started high school, I often unwound in front of the TV after I got home and finished my homework. That’s how I happened upon How I Met Your Mother.
How I Met Your Mother, for the uninitiated, is basically Friends for a newer generation, a comedy about a group of best friends in their twenties who deal with the ups and downs of burgeoning careers in New York City. And just like Friends, it’s hardly diverse—all five protagonists are white, cis, straight, and able-bodied. 
But remember, I was used to that. At fourteen, I expected nothing more, and all of my favorite characters, actors, and actresses were the same (save in anime/manga). As a kid growing up in the diaspora, with a fear of being considered a “fob”—fresh off the boat—at school, I didn’t watch any Bangladeshi media, either. I rolled my eyes at the acting, I begged my dad to turn off the music when he played his favorite folk music tapes in the car, and I discarded as much of my Bangladeshiness as I could when I walked through the heavy doors of the school building, as if they were as easy to remove as an article of clothing. Even all my crushes were on people who better fit the narrative of the books I loved dearly—AKA white.
There had been times, before How I Met Your Mother, where Bangladesh was mentioned in passing. Never Bangladeshi characters, only the country, but even that was monumental when people I confessed my heritage to would say, “Do you mean Indian?” In spite of my feigned apathy, every time one of these rare instances occurred, I would point at the TV like that Leonardo DiCaprio meme and rush to tell my siblings, “Hey! They just said something about Bangladesh. Isn’t that weird?” They’d always respond, “Yeah,” because it was weird. 
Ranjit, though. Ranjit said, “Actually, I’m from Bangladesh.”
My heart might have skipped a beat.
“How could you possibly remember that, Priyanka?” you might scoff. I’ll tell you how; because my heart does the same thing even now, when I learn a character is Bangladeshi. You know what else I still do? Choke up when telling someone about HOW MUCH Ranjit’s portrayal not only hurt me, but eventually, angered me.
Here is the exact interaction in the pilot episode of How I Met Your Mother:
B: Hey, Ranjit. Where are you from? Lebanon?
R: Actually, I’m from Bangladesh.
B: The women hot there?
R: Here’s a picture of my wife.
B: A simple “no” would’ve sufficed.
    How do I hate everything that’s wrong with this terrible, racist joke? Let me count the ways. First of all, Barney is a sexist jerk. You learn that as soon as you meet him. So the fact that he objectifies an entire group of women (of color!!!) and then generalizes them as ugly is just icing on a sexist, racist cake. Secondly, Ranjit is a brown caricature: a taxi driver with a thick accent who is a very, very minor recurring character in the show, there for the purpose of cracking heavily accented one-liners and carting the white protagonists around in his cab. Thirdly, Marshall Manesh, who plays Ranjit, is Iranian-American, so on top of all the other ways this joke was a garbage fire, it was yet another case of interchanging brown people—because we’re all the same, right?
    That’s my analysis as an adult who has more than half her life to process that joke. Let me tell you how fourteen year old Priyanka reacted: my heart, which had previously skipped a beat, fell and cracked on the floor. I stared at the screen, disbelieving that a character whom I’d laughed at up until now had just said such a cruel thing about Bangladeshi women—women like my mother and grandmother. As an already self-conscious little girl who kept her nose buried in a book to avoid too much social interaction, it killed me. 
But I kept watching. Why? That, too, was what I expected. Why should a white character know anything about a tiny, inconsequential place like Bangladesh? Why should I let it keep me from enjoying the rest of the show, which everyone said was funny, the next big thing in comedy, the next Friends? So I watched, and I laughed, but that hurt never really started healing until I became old enough to unpack it.
    It became my dream to become an author. The show didn’t influence my decision. I was a geeky kid, regardless, and had fallen into the world of fanfiction by thirteen, a world that was—and still is, to this day—largely white.
    It would be approximately a decade before I finished my first book starring a Bangladeshi character, and then a handful of more years before any of the books I wrote would sell to a publisher--The Love Match, my debut novel, a young adult romcom about a Bangladeshi-American teenager, Zahra Khan, who lives in Paterson, New Jersey, the same diaspora community I grew up in, and gets set up by her mother with her supposed perfect match, a boy from a wealthy, local Bangladeshi family, despite her budding feelings for a newly arrived orphan from Bangladesh who works at a neighborhood teashop with her.
    It’s a book where Bangladeshi teens like the one I used to be get to be beautiful even if they don’t conform to the Eurocentric beauty standards of a series like How I Met Your Mother that made it okay to mock an entire community of women of color. It’s a book where their joy is celebrated and the conflict is more than just their oppression at the hands of society—the latter being the stories I was most used to seeing myself in as a kid, which forced me to contend with the painfulness of reality rather than giving me the escapist fantasies I craved. It’s a book with an all-brown cast, because if How I Met Your Mother could have the opposite, why can’t I?
    Things are slowly improving. The Love Match is proof of that, and it would never have come to be if not for the authors who chipped away at the glass ceiling before me, like Adiba Jaigirdar and Karuna Riazi. But only by supporting, uplifting, and empowering authors like me, Adiba, and Karuna—as well as other marginalized authors—can we ensure that we are authentically and kindly representing vulnerable people.
    Especially in kid lit, that is so important.
    I never want another child to feel they are no more than the butt of an ugly joke.

You can purchase her book here: 
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Love-Match/Priyanka-Taslim/9781665901109
 

Priyanka Taslim is a Bangladeshi American writer, teacher, and lifelong New Jersey resident. Having grown up in a bustling Bangladeshi diaspora community, surrounded by her mother’s entire clan and many aunties of no relation, her writing often features families, communities, and all the drama therein. Currently, Priyanka teaches English by day and tells all kinds of stories about Bangladeshi characters by night. Her writing usually stars spunky Bangladeshi heroines finding their place in the world—and a little swoony romance, too. You can connect with her on Twitter and Instagram @BhootBabe and check out her website, PriyankaTaslim.com. The Love Match is her debut novel.
​https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Love-Match/Priyanka-Taslim/9781665901109
 
And here is Priyanka’s bio:
Priyanka Taslim is a Bangladeshi American writer, teacher, and lifelong New Jersey resident. Having grown up in a bustling Bangladeshi diaspora community, surrounded by her mother’s entire clan and many aunties of no relation, her writing often features families, communities, and all the drama therein. Currently, Priyanka teaches English by day and tells all kinds of stories about Bangladeshi characters by night. Her writing usually stars spunky Bangladeshi heroines finding their place in the world—and a little swoony romance, too. You can connect with her on Twitter and Instagram @BhootBabe and check out her website, PriyankaTaslim.com. The Love Match is her debut novel.