The Ambivalence of Invisibility: Experiencing Amsterdam as a South Asian Woman

By Visakha Chowdhury

I had a fascinating realization within my first few, jet-lagged days in Amsterdam; as I walked through Schiphol, and dragged myself and my bags to my hotel in Europaplein, I had a growing inkling that in this city, I was for the most part, wonderfully and blissfully invisible. And as I say this, I realize that invisibility sounds like a response to or a consequence of structural insularity, or if not that, at least an incredibly lonely and alienating prospect. But I assure you, this invisibility was not only a relief to me, but an important aspect of my integration within the city; it allowed me to blend in with the diverse, colorful masses which populate this unique city and feel at home within it, and also enabled me to sense, observe, and absorb its ways. This was my first experience living away from my home, and finding my feet within this new city was made far more comfortable because of my invisibility, as it softened the edges of my newness, and gave me the resolve to falter, grow, and make the city my own.

My musings on invisibility stem mainly from my negotiations with and navigations within Amsterdam’s public spaces, and when I say that I was invisible, I mean that I felt as invisible as anyone else whilst inhabiting these spaces. I grew up in India, and my interactions with public space were heavily impacted by gendered considerations, the weight of which seep through your skin and into your bones, weaving wariness into your psyche. In my country, the hypervisibility of being a woman functioning in public engenders hypervigilance responses; women constantly assess potential threats and the myriad microaggressions of simply operating within city publics, all the while altering and adjusting their actions to avoid aggravation. And I say this from experience, it is incredibly exhausting. Be it the act of covering up while using public transport, or simply accepting the normalization of people staring at you, operating in public is draining in terms of the constant, overwhelming weight of perception. Specific South Asian strictures of monitoring and controlling feminine bodies make themselves known through in-your-face or watered down ways while operating in public spaces in my country, and therefore, public hypervisibility was the normal I was socialized into.

Consequently, being invisible in Amsterdam was a welcome change to me. Gaze and perception are ever-present, but their intensity was at a much lower threshold, and hence, it allowed me to find out what I actually preferred to do or be in public when I was not being hypervigilant. And I cannot emphasize the genuine peace that brought me; to get the space to explore who I was, what I like, where I would like to be, to read a book in public, to reclaim the night, and to explore new cultures and traditions without pressure may seem like trivial things, but it made all the difference to me. Public invisibility was a balm to my frayed, anxious self, and it enabled me to think about what I would want my life to be like, beyond academic or professional achievement. There is underappreciated radicality, especially for women in this neoliberal, postfeminist age, to imagine existence beyond capitalist life trajectories. And I truly believe that public invisibility in Amsterdam provided me the mental and emotional space to explore such possibilities, and contemplate on my future self in terms of who, not what I wanted to be.

Yet, I cannot ignore the fact that my invisibility within this city was underscored by certain complexities. While I enjoyed my invisibility, I began to view its escapist tones with the passage of time. The peace it brought me was tenuous; there were instances when I craved being seen, my postcolonial legacy and the Netherlands’ complex implications within the same being acknowledged, but my invisibility reinforced my institutional invisibilization. Especially within cultural institutions, I felt invisibilized by the guarded statements, obscure vocalizations, and sanitized accounts of Netherlands’ colonial past. It almost felt like I paid the price of my invisibility, of being a seamless part of the ostensibly inclusive social fabric of the city by acquiescing to the invisibilization of the complex histories that shaped my existence. It was in these moments that I felt the dissonance of my invisibility, between the harmonious anonymity I craved and the responsibility that I owed my past, and between who I wished to be and who I was. This tussle made me realize that my invisibility, to some extent, was escapist; invisibility in a new city could only yield me momentary peace, because as a South Asian woman, the myriad, layered gendered and colonial legacies of my subcontinent permeated my being, and how could I hope to escape the fine-milled debris of historical violence and cultural decimation ever-present within the epidermis, lungs, thoughts, and soul of the postcolonial subject? With this knowledge, I could not remain invisible, because my invisibility and its peace would be marred by the looming guilt of not confronting the forces that shaped my predicament as a South Asian woman, as well as a South Asian woman within European spaces of knowledge and cultural production.

Thus, during my time in Amsterdam, I grew to note the various ways in which histories and experiences of people who looked and spoke like me were elided, obfuscated, and ignored, so that I remained cautious of the restful invisibility offered to me by the city. Through my academic platform, I brought such issues into discussion, and absorbed as much as I could about decoloniality. My attempts to confront my invisibilization within European social structures were raw, introspective, and challenging, far removed from the comforting invisibility that I had begun to crave - but I at least did not feel complicit in my own oppression. Therefore, I can confidently say that my year in Amsterdam, and my vacillations between visibility and invisibility, have given me immense insight into finding the balance between preserving my peace and acknowledging my cultural past. I am incredibly thankful for my time in Amsterdam – the city allowed me to be a part of its motions and provided me the space to actually stop and think, coaxed me to look into the privilege that underscored the form of invisibility I craved, and gave me clarity about my own positionality, one which I hope to continually scrutinize and interrogate throughout my academic journey.  My time in this city sharpened my recognition of the weight and dimensions of my own postcolonial subjectivity. Navigating Euro/Western academic and cultural spaces impressed upon me the urgency and intensity of my positionality, and this awareness is going to be crucial in the choices I make as a future South Asian woman academic, especially in terms of the forms of knowledge I seek to engage with, promote, and provide discursive space to.