The Naming: Hajarah

Nicole Rose Gelormino

Hajarah

2020

oil on canvas

48 x 36”

An icy white and blue tutu billows as though wind is passing through it from behind, though its bottom hem remains pinned beyond the edge of the canvas. White pleats of the tutu transform upward into two European beige mounds, which in turn transform into tan and then brown limbs reaching from smokey gray to gold to sun yellow. Hands of burnt tree branches spread across the top third of the canvas. Hajarah is the name of my Punjabi grandfather who arrived at the dock of San Pedro, California and made a family of European-Indian-Americans. On the second page of white supremacist, anti-immigration, anti-South-Asian novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), French author Jean Raspail refers to a group of Indian migrants arriving on his French shore as mob of "Gandhi-arms" reaching out from their white “rags and saris.” Watching America experience a relapse of the sickness that is white supremacy, I find myself again contemplating my current and ancestral role as a white and brown woman.