I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

We are all of us engaged in a collective self-harm by trying to love him, seeking to be loved by him.

What is the line between being vulnerable and prostrating yourself for a system that won’t recognise you?

Do I weaponise my own pain and cause harm to myself by revelling in that pain, nurturing it, putting myself in danger to encourage it and then working it over by verbalising it for display, to show society, I am a human being and I feel pain just like you.

Our human imaginations are funnelled to think along the narrow lines of the algorithm—if you liked that you’ll love this. The narratives open to us are the ones based on our identities as it is these stories that are market and social media approved.

For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness—by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen.

Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neo-colonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being ‘in service’ to our ‘communities’ by ‘taking up space’ as if by being true to ourselves, we’re doing everyone else a massive favour?

The easiest route to build a following is to penetrate culture and the fastest way to do this is to tell them the story they want to hear—the one about our assimilation to whiteness or the abhorrence, or failure of this assimilation so white people with the keys to the castle can gasp and shake their heads and say, I never knew it was this bad, it’s [insert year] for God’s sake, and then will lower the drawbridge to let us in? We know succumbing to this will secure us the status we seek. It is how we can have a ‘name’, we can sit on the panels and talk about ‘diversity’, come up with earnest solutions inside historic buildings in front of a rapt echo-chambered public which will never amount to anything except feeling good about ourselves for how terrible we feel at the state of the world,

We think explaining ourselves or justifying our existence isn’t too heavy a price to pay to gain entry through those gilded gates where liberal artsy white people will tokenise us as a symbol of their ideological progress—they can think they are so exotic for being into your work, aren’t they so edgy, so underground or else most likely they will tip-toe around us, deferential but still exclusionary, it’s not such a high price for admittance to the cultural establishment, we reason.

We are saddened by the knowledge that nothing really collectively changes but reassured by the thought that it did for me on an individual level, as we backstroke across the vast placid sea of righteous superiority.

The comments under this post all express urgent, alarmed concern for the sacrificed dishcloth and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

What is taste? Who determines the architecture of taste? What kind of person are you to be intimately invested in acquiring antique Welsh stick chairs to accent a room, or to deliberately curate an association between said chairs and your personhood to other people, to be the kind of person who other people say of you when you’re not there, oh they have such good taste. Who decides these things? How do you acquire this knowledge of how to strip a room back but still convey luxury? What does it say about your person when you know what these desirable objects are? What does it say about your femininity if you know how to make a room pleasing? Knowing how to make a home is the ultimate wreath to crown your femininity. Where do you attain the confidence and the certainty to impose and expand yourself and your tastes onto four walls of a room and what does it say about you when you can’t do this? What if the objects are there because they are functional and not to inspire envy in others? Where the chair you buy is to be sat on, not to be looked at and not sat on because it is too precious to be used or where the addition of your body will jeopardise the value of the object. How do you know how to elevate your life to art, something to be admired, envied, aspired to? Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology whic...

I fantasise and fall in love with a version of him I’m not sure exists outside of my imagination. He is constantly failing in comparison to this person I know he could be. If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we could be happy.

The woman I am obsessed with is not native to America. Historically she is the immigrant. I watch her talk online about her father’s poetry, his advocacy and his way of living, the only authority she has is rooted in being the perfect embodiment of her alternate upbringing. She espouses the values of stewardship, of taking care of the land, of the importance and necessity of farmers. Her lack of awareness of being a white woman borne of a white man in a country baked in the violence of European colonialism, dictating values that were and are already being practiced by Indigenous people before they were forcibly disinherited, is the way in which liberalism separates itself from the systems of racism and genocide and from the structures that organise the way the world benefits particular groups over others. It is the ripping of the Indigenous people from the land and the land being continually pillaged for neo-colonial profit which has the climate spiralling into catastrophe. The West’s insistence that it is humans who are an antithesis to the Earth is short-sighted and incorrect. It is a certain kind of human built into a particular system whereby solid, physical things like ancestral land, a tree, the rivers, water and rocks become unreal next to the dreamt up, magical apparatus of the stock market and quarterly growth. What is defined as ‘real’ has become abstracted—fuelling a disassociated state where we destroy without considering the consequences. As native people are ...

The woman I am obsessed with says she is sad and worried about the state of America and I think, it’s a funny thing to feel sad—or feel anything about racism because what a luxury. She is able to disregard that America has always been a white European genocidal project, a settler-colonial state founded upon death and violence. It has never demonstrated the soaring values the American founders myth insists upon. Believing this falsified story, saying, we are capable of more, this isn’t us rather than that bone-tired weariness of, we always said it was this, we always told you but you didn’t believe us when it happened to us but you believe it now it is happening to you—is Exceptionalism.

Her feeling sad about what happens when an unfair verdict is passed or yet another Black person is murdered at the hands of vigilantes or the police means she expects more from a country and its systems, which have always suppressed and dehumanised the Indigenous population it removed and the Black people it brought over in order to make a profit. She doesn’t understand what racism really is. She only posts the exceptional things Black people do on her grid.