Other times, however, this attention made me feel like the world was a shallow, fickle place, without depth or substance, hollow, vacuous, matlabi, and cruel. It was as if, overnight, my words mattered, even when they were, frankly, somewhat mundane or being uttered by a million others who were patronized or outright ignored. The same people who I’d previously been invisible to were now looking at me with something like awe. And not just awe, not always awe. I sometimes detected a kind of presumed beneficence in their gaze that reminded me of photographs of white missionaries in India. So proud were they of having a brown woman on their stage, of humbling themselves by taking her seriously. And other times, I saw a variation of that beneficence, something more like penitence, like they wanted me to tell them what was wrong with them. As if, by having me up there, they were somehow atoning for their sins.