“Self-righteous.” That's the customary description I've been labeled with since I became a vegan. Refusing to consume animals and their by-products as a way of life is often misunderstood as impractical and impossible, even after a full explanation of your reasons, and even if you walk what you talk. It's equally annoying opposite is the word righteous when it is used as compliment. People at poetry readings, old college friends I run into at the grocery store, and well-meaning white leftists constantly refer to me and that word in the same breath.
Most self-proclaimed vegans I know have heard one or both words used to describe them, and for me, it's a misconception that I've chosen veganism because “it's the right thing to do.” More than anything, veganism has chosen me, and the more I live, the more I believe it is a lifestyle that sustains the existence of our world. The main reason I undergo life-altering epiphanies is that I have serious problems with dissonance. Once a seismic shift has occurred in my worldview, it's time to clean shop.
People who don't fully understand veganism harbor a dual curiosity of lure and loathing. The most common insinuation and the direct question that I get is, “How can you do it? I know you must cheat once in a while. Oh come on!” It's as if only absolutes are valid and that the regimen of eating only certain foods is the only motivation. Yes, like many vegans, I am not one-hundred-percent all of the time. Sometimes it's out of genuine ignorance, especially in my early days. But once in a while it's because I haven't had a bean pie in eight years, and by eating a regular one I can figure out how to adapt it to be vegan. Occasionally, these slip-ups lead me to feel guilty, and often it's a reminder that it's okay to be human, no pun intended.
No one asks, “How has your way of life sustained you?” We think in terms of logical limitation and skip the leap of faith, the uneasy journey of the spirit. I am not looking for perfection, but my perfect substitute is looking. Our existence often means the extinction of another being. There is a great responsibility and challenge in that philosophy. My life has broadened to an antiviolence perspective that sees institutional/cultural abuse and violence toward women and children.
I became a vegan even before I knew the full meaning of the word. I was at a summer camp for the Forum to Advance Minorities in Engineering (FAME) program, where we would prepare debates, write essays, do SAT practice tests, and hear lectures by professionals in the field of science and engineering. Both of my older brothers went through the program, and I was basically forced to go by my mother and chauffeured there by my father. However, there was great comfort in being in a place where I was expected to be young, gifted, and Black.
I was reading Gandhi's All Men Are Brothers and Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' with Mother Nature. The concept of ahimsa, or “non-injury” in Sanskrit, was a doctrine of consciously doing no harm to any living being. I am reassured by the fact that we can make an active choice to embrace the interdependence of life rather than destroy it. Ahimsa is a whole vision of interconnected struggle that provides no easy answers nor a one-way approach. It made me aware of privileges we take for granted as humans living in the global North and the responsibility we have for the ecological, animal, and human costs of our way of life.
At that point in my life, I had reached the apex of quirky awkwardness and adding one more piece of kindling to the fire didn't hurt. In the cafeteria, I stood in line behind a tall and patchouli-scented man, and asked him if the rice he was piling onto his plate had any dairy in it. “Yes,” he replied. “It's not vegan, it has a little cheese.” And there I had the word and the pronunciation. When a dietitian came to give us a presentation on healthy eating and proper exercise, I mentioned to her that I was a recently converted vegan, and she explained about getting enough protein and calcium from beans, legumes, and tofu. When I arrived home for the weekend, just a month before eleventh grade, I told my parents at the dining table that I would pass on the chicken and just eat the plantains, “and, by the way, I no longer eat anything coming from an animal.”
My parents went through the stages of confusion, shock, denial, anger, threats, and misguided advice. My mother resorted to making things up such as, “It's against our religion to go on diets.” And my father would offer up odd alternatives, “Here, eat fish, is no meat!” My mother finally suspiciously concluded that I was under the influence of some hippie teacher or classmate.
While they certainly wouldn't take credit for inspiring my veganism, my parents do bear some responsibility for my unique identity and emergent worldview. From Guyana and Indonesia respectively, my mother and father are from two different ends of the world. They met in graduate school, married, and had my eldest brother in a matter of a few years. They studied at the University of Guyana in the era of Walter Rodney and had experienced the independence struggles of their countries. I grew up hearing about the post-colonial struggle in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean as much as I heard about the Black Liberation struggle in the United States.
At a recent panel discussion on revolution in the twenty-first century held at a Training for Change workshop in Philadelphia, I listened to young activists describe the fact that the global South is leading the world in liberation strategies. I grew up never knowing that people could think otherwise. Becoming vegan was one of many awakenings to an authentic life of informed interdependence and respect for all life. After being a vegan for two years, I learned about the fair trade movement and attended a regional conference for United Students Against Sweatshops.
Veganism cultivates an attention to minute details of food ingredients, clothing labels, and how the things you consume are produced. This mindfulness leads to the deeper investigation of all things you consume, not only as to their material content but also the conditions in which the products are manufactured, their ecological impact, and the standard of living they create for all those on the chain of raw material, manufacturing, selling, buying, and disposing.
Being as obsessed with food as much as we vegans are, I wanted to know where the food I eat comes from, who grew it, and how it made it to my table. So it goes for clothes, shoes, jewelry, cleaning supplies, stationery, cars, appliances, home, and even the places where we shop for these items. Part of my tenure as a vegan has been spent eschewing much more. During our four years of marriage, my husband, Sahr, and I have not worn rings, as a way to draw attention to the exploitative diamond industry in Sierra Leone, where he was born. Veganism has spawned my interest in antiglobalization, antiviolence, organic agriculture, voluntary simplicity, and faith systems indigenous to West Africa and South Asia.
My first vegan friend was a white girl in my high school named Kristin. When we met, I had been vegan for six months, and the more we talked, the more I realized we'd met before in elementary school. “You went to Highlands Elementary, too!”
“Yup, I think I remember you. They used to call you Peanut,” I said, feeling surprised by memory. Kristen became a vegetarian as a thirteen-year-old mainly as an animal-rights activist. Then a few years later, she started a vegan lifestyle. My journey into veganism came the summer that I was sixteen. As with our personalities, our journeys were quite different. Monkish and introspective, I became vegan through reading, revelation, and reluctance. Fast forward eight years, and my father has passed from heart disease, and my mother sends me articles from the February issue of PETA's magazine about Black vegetarians, and brags to people about her hip daughter.
Of course, it's not all happy endings. There's the matter of instant gratification. People see difference and immediately want to grasp it, or more precisely, an explanation of your state of being in their language, from their frame of reference, and in terms that seem justifiable to them. A friend who shall remain nameless was especially skilled at plucking my nerves, overanalyzing and criticizing what little she knows about my lifestyle with questions like, “How are you going to be vegan when the revolution comes?” It isn't a bad question; but I believe that being vegan is part of the revolution.
Sometimes I struggle and think, “Fuck this, if I could choose another life, I would.” If it were in my logical power to deny the call to action from wherever it summons me, I would. For me, there is both choice and obligation. In many ways, life is a series of responsibilities, and it is our right to choose how we fulfill these obligations. There is a voice in my head that both motivates me and paralyzes me. It keeps telling me that I have to hold it down. Like professor after professor at the historically Black university I attended, it says, “To whom much is given, much is expected.”
Although I also have Asian ancestry, I have lived all of my life in Black communities, and often self-identify as Black. But I am tired of the generational guilt of Black people that seems hereditary. My mother's family has a history of breast cancer, diabetes, sickle cell anemia, heart disease, hair loss, and cataracts. But the disease I fear the most is the feeling that I've failed every generation before me. The revolution we struggled for to own ourselves has also become the struggle we owe to ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to open our eyes to a future we never imagined and to see liberation in ways we did not think possible. To some degree, we are all throwbacks, just trying to make lemons into lemonade. Our elders think that we have forgotten their pain, but we remember theirs every day as we try to struggle through our own.
My journey to connect more deeply with my Indonesian heritage is something I have taken very seriously in recent years, and my experience in conflict-resolution work and peace-building has been a foundation for that.
My home state is the second smallest in the nation and arguably the most incorporated. Delaware is one of the capitals of the nation's poultry industries. We have Allen's, Tyson, Mountaire Farms, and Perdue. If you have spent a day in Kent or Sussex County, you will have seen at least one truck packed with cages of soiled, restless chickens. New Castle County, the northern part of the state, is the land of banks and chemical industries such as MBNA, Chase, and DuPont. I grew up in an apartment complex that stood alongside a creek with a chemical plant on the other side. As kids, my two older brothers and I would wade thigh deep through the murky water and return home to our parents' scolding. In retrospect, I wonder what could have been in that water and how that could relate to the fact that two of us have chronic asthma.
Living in an environment that has a stronghold on factory farming, militarization, anti-immigrant attitudes and legislation, and environmental racism has been a constant source of sadness, but is also a source of opportunity for transformation. That is one of my biggest challenges right now.
In a time of war, genocide, ecological disasters, and xenophobia, the need for a worldview that anchors daily life to the calling of hope and transformation is undeniable. My life is a continuous search for wholeness, which means healing my body and my heart, and renewing my reverence for my origins in the spirit and on earth.