I Browngirl, You Jane

I was once in love with a white girl.

I was once in love with a white girl, and her name was Jane.

Jane Eyre. Neither shaken nor stirred. Just plain, smart, and good, and got the boy in the end. The small, mousy, but righteous heroine of Charlotte Bronte’s truly unforgettable novel Jane Eyre (published October 16, 1847).

(October 16 is my birthdate, by the way. Not 1847, by the way.)

I was a BrownGirl, thirteen, in a little town in India, over-educated the shit out by the postcolonial legacy of two hundred years of English as the language of dreams for the heathens. I devoured Jane Eyre in, I think, three afternoons.

I was being BrownGirled.

Jane Eyre was like the BrownGirl’s Bible. I was a brown girl. The Fair and Lovely girls around me got all the attention. Then along came Jane, showing me that inner beauty mattered more than skin color, and that the men worth having would always go for the uncut diamonds, Jane and I, in the end.

Only years later, after I read Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea, I realized that my love of Jane was a colonized love. In Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea I read about Bertha Mason, the mad mixed-race wife locked up in the tower of Jane’s hopelessly married aristocratic lover St. John Rochester, who needs to die, in the fire she sets herself— crazy immigrant—so Jane and Rochester can marry.

I get it. My imagination was colonized at thirteen or, actually in elementary school. And shaped my life forever after. I am still the odd one out in my own country. I always will be. I never feel autochthonous anywhere. And maybe I still love Jane Eyre, and Jane Eyre.

But, the truth is I am Bertha, the obstacle to Jane’s happiness. As Browngirl, I am a threat. Not just to Jane, but to all of Jane’s sorority.

But the truth is one thing, and brainwashing is another. Charlotte Bronte brainwashed me at thirteen so much I couldn’t see I was in fact Browngirl, Bertha Mason. Jane didn’t return my love; I was her problem.

I am in recovery from my hopeless love for Jane.

Wish me luck.

JaneEyre #CharlotteBronte #BerthaMason #colonialism #education