Yesterday, on my way back home from school via the grocery, I was just about to cross the usually quiet intersection near my apartment when I witnessed two cars avoid a crash by a mere second. I felt my heart jump, as one of the cars braked to a screeching halt. And then I noticed that both of the cars were being driven by mothers, each with a young child on her backseat. Without thinking too much about which of the two was to “blame,” although the woman who braked had shot both her hands up from the wheel and yelled inaudibly in apparent shock and anger, I couldn’t help but ponder the what-could-have-happened. A big factor in that equation is of course what we call time. Every second in time is a fork in the road, and even as we go down one path, we are haunted by the other. It is through this metaphor that I’m trying to make sense of my mental response to this (non)-event, both immediately and afterward.

Thinking now about some of this reminds me of another time that I distinctly remember my heart jumping, and that was from a near-death experience years ago when some relatives and I were in an SUV that barely avoided a head-on collision with a bus. There was still an impact, just not face-to-face, thanks to a split-second decision by our driver to actually veer off the road–which in itself was somewhat tricky because we happened to be on a small bridge over a stream. For years since, I have to tried hard to recover a trace of what it was that crossed my mind as we sat there in the car, sure of death and looking straight through the windshield at the huge bus about to come upon us. The only useful explanation I have been able to invoke is that of weightlessness: the feeling one has inside a fast-descending elevator in a skyscraper, or the feeling I imagine one has when bungee-jumping. But I am speaking, of course, of a mental weightlessness, not physical.

They say that in the moment of death, as time comes to a decisive halt, one has a flashback of one’s entire life. But alas, we will never know if that really happens. For in that case, there is no what-could-have-been.

Yesterday I found myself thinking about ships, as I sat at the very back of a packed lecture hall listening to a professor who happens to be the biggest figure in a major school of literary theory and criticism. I was there both for who he was and for what he was teaching: a course exploring mobility and culture through a literary/historical mapping of three particular oceanic voyages in the mid-17th century. As he made his introductory remarks on this first day of class, the projector screen next to him displayed an array of fascinating visuals, including spatial simulations on Google Earth–an impressive use of technology in the classroom (and this was not even a science class!). At one point, his PowerPoint slides held up a very neat computer-modeled diagram of a ship, marked with labels for every mast, sail, and corner of the deck that has a name in English.

My mind drifted off to a talk by Amitav Ghosh several months ago at a local bookstore, where he was reading from his latest novel, Sea of Poppies. As he discussed the colonial and remarkably cosmopolitan context of 19th century Calcutta, Ghosh described his fascination with sea travel and what he considers a most intricate “machine,” the ship. His interest in language led him to wonder how sailors of diverse cultural/linguistic backgrounds communicated in order to make this machine function. Ghosh talked about cultural contact and the immense hybridity of languages–often to an extent that most native speakers of a language don’t ever realize. Many of us never really think of the influence of Portugese, for instance, on Bengali, Hindi/Urdu, and other Indian languages precisely due to those Iberian ships that brought European commerce to India. I was quite surprised to learn of the Portugese origin of such a mundane word as balti, referring to that ubiquitous bucket that no desi household can do without. But of course, the word balti is now officially an English word, at least in England, thanks to such culinary delights as balti chicken, reportedly the English people’s favorite take-out. And thus language travels, from the buckets on board 15th c. Portugese ships to the cooking-pots of 20th c. Indian restaurants in England.

As I recalled all this, sitting there in the lecture hall, and realizing the extent to which Ghosh’s reflections so strongly resonate some of the themes invoked by the course, I wondered for a moment if perhaps I should go up to the professor after class and ask him if he knew how much his ideas paralleled those of Amitav Ghosh. Of course, I dismissed the thought, for surely they must know each other (they were once colleagues in the English department). I returned to following the lecture, but was soon distracted again by the photocopied handouts that were distributed at the beginning of class. I turned the cover page to find what immediately raised by eyebrows: it was an essay entitled “The Imam and the Indian,” by no other than Amitav Ghosh!

“The Imam and the Indian” is a very interesting story in its own right. On the issue of mobility, it offers the following description of what Ghosh encounters in a rural village in Egypt:

When I first came to that quiet corner of the Nile Delta I had expected to find on that most ancient and most settled of soils a settled and restful people. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge. Many of them had worked and traveled in teh sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, other had been in Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen as soldiers, otehrs to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims, a few had visited Europe: some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas. And none of this was new: their grandparents and ancestors and relatives had traveled and migrated too, in much the same way as mine had, in the Indian subcontinent–because of wars, or for money and jobs, or perhaps simply because they got tired of living always in one place. You could read the history of this restlessness in the villagers’ surnames: they had names which derived from cities in the Levant, from Turkey, from faraway towns in Nubia; it was as though people had drifted here from every corner of the Middle East. The wanderlust of its founders had been plowed into the soil of the village: it seemed to me sometimes that every man in it was a traveler. Everyone, that is, except Khamees the Rat, and even his surname, as I discovered later, meant “of Sudan.” [Amitav Ghosh, "The Imam and the Indian," in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 50]

Of course, if the passage above neglects to consider the dynamics of power in travel (for e.g. we cannot but wonder, are slaves “migrants”?), the climax of the story itself has everything to do with that, as Ghosh ponders the cultural position of the Egyptian and the Indian, vis-a-vis the West. But I don’t want to spoil it for you any further, as I definitely encourage you to read the whole essay–which should take no more than 10 minutes, and which you should be able to read online, here.

These thoughts on travel and culture are a reminder that I need to revisit James Clifford, from whom I borrow the phrase in the title of this post.

During the course of a conversation after dinner somewhere in midtown Manhattan last weekend, a friend casually admitted that he has disposable income, and that he wouldn’t mind paying more in taxes for the benefit of someone without health insurance. This was in response to a question posed by another friend, who is generally against paying higher taxes. While I remained quiet during much of this Saturday night banter, I thought to myself that I am in a fairly similar situation as the former friend, and although I’m usually eager to save as much as possible, I believe in higher taxes for the benefit of the community and country as a whole and of the poor in particular. I then wondered, however, why it was the case that my friend, the school teacher and I, the non-profit employee are the ones who worry about others and are willing to share our meager income with those caught in the structural violence of poverty. All this while some of our friends in finance and other profitable industries make many multiples of what we do, but seem less willing to part with a portion of their earnings.

Later that night, I returned downtown to an apartment around the corner from Wall Street where I was crashing in with a couple of other friends. One of them I had not seen yet, because he was at work all day (yes, even on a Saturday). I had already been asleep when he came back home, apparently at around 2:30am! The next morning, on Sunday, I finally got to say hi to him before he had to hurry back to work, and that was just past 10:30am. Such is the life of a recent college graduate at a major investment-banking firm. Worth noting, of course, that he probably earns more than what I might even after I acquire a PhD in about a decade, and possibly even after I achieve the coveted rank of full professor after another decade on tenure track. Even so, the woes of a starving scholar aside, I wondered if my friend is really being paid as much as he probably deserves. In all honesty, I don’t think overworked analysts at investment banks receive a fair share of the profits raked in by partners and executives. The annual compensation for the CEO of my friend’s firm ranks among the highest in the nation, and I’m talking about $50m+ per year.

It so happens that this same firm’s much revered charitable division is a major donor to the organization that I work for. Despite the grandeur of the corporation’s claims to philanthropic commitment, the truth is that the big fat checks they write to non-profits are still nothing compared to the stock options they issue to their big shot employees. And not to even bring up the question of tax breaks! By the time the money trickles down to the bottom of society, there’s barely any left to be meaningful. Charity is not justice; unless the process of charity can negate itself, its being is dependent on the very inequalities it supposedly aims to resolve.

Sometimes during lunch breaks, I walk by Harvard Square and come across the poor homeless people begging from passers by outside the bank lobbies. I rarely have change to spare, but even if I do, I don’t always give it away. I feel guilty, but also confused. I begin to wonder why I am the one who should feel so guilty.

And then I feel guilty for even thinking this way, for I really have so much to be grateful for.

So, y’all know how Facebook has this new feature in your homepage called “People You May Know”? (basically just a strategy for FB’s hegemonic empire to further encroach upon our lives). Well, occasionally it does show people I know, though most of them are ones I don’t know well enough to be FB-friends with. So today it showed this one person whose last name happens to be the same as that of a very famous artist, who I happen to be a fan of. It’s not a rare last name, but just out of curiosity I clicked to open up the profile, where I noticed that this person’s high school is in the same city that the artist lives in (a city that is also very much at the heart of said artist’s work). So as an expert researcher, the next thing I did was to quickly open up the wikipedia entry for the artist, and voila! Artist has a child of the same first-name as this person on Facebook! Small world, eh?

For a nerd like me, a nerd-celebrity like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak inspires the kind of hysteria that many people would experience when having a chance to meet, say, Angelina Jolie.

Well, last Thursday I got to see Spivak at Harvard Divnity School, where she was the speaker for this year’s William James Lecture on Religious Experience. Contrary to expectation, I did understand at least half of what she was saying. Also contrary to rumors that I’ve heard from no less than two different friends, she does not at all match the profile of a stereotypical fierce Bengali woman. I think she’s really quite adorable. In fact, aspiring academics should collectively recognize her as our goddess (even as I realize that she would probably detest that).

Her talk, titled “Imagination, Not Culture: A Singular Example,” was a Spivakesque take on the 19th century Bengali religious figure, the Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi, whom Spivak deliberately chose to refer using her non-devotional name, Saradamani. Spivak presented details from the biography of this intriguing woman, along with critical analyses from a number of fascinating perspectives (for e.g., “the female as honorary male,” so often the inevitably gendered appropriation of the girl who comfortably hangs out with guys). Spivak was also fundamentally concerned with the aloukik, or transcendental. She spoke of the ecastatic experiences of Sarada Devi and her husband, the famous Ramakrishna, with whom she was engaged in a marriage of celibacy (It is a delight to be able to understand untranslatable Bengali phrases: ami jeno kirokom hoye gechilum). Much like Ramakrishna’s encounters with Sarada Devi, I can only describe our experience of Spivak’s talk as one of intellectual ecstasy, as I witnessed much of the audience, including myself, as visibly enthralled.

It’s worth noting that at least three times during the whole lecture and the Q&A session, she made the oft-quoted statement: “I am not an Indianist, I am a Europeanist.” I have to say, I think Spivak has a great sense of humor, which makes her work so much more exciting despite the notorious opacity of her prose. I also think she really has a very humble personality, at least compared to that other figure in the “holy trinity” of postcolonial theory, Homi Bhabha–who a colleague of mine at work once described as “quite full of himself!” (I must add though that Bhabha’s sense of humor is unbeatable!)

I just noticed, by the way, that Spivak had briefly mentioned Sarada Devi at the end of “Moving Devi,” her other famous essay after “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. “Moving Devi” was the subject of a talk at UPenn that was covered by a New York Times article six years ago: “Creating a Stir Wherever She Goes.” The article was a look at the academic cult surrounding Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, both the author and the person (the sari, the crewcut hair dyed pinkish). An amusing and informative read, so check it out if you like.

The short version: I’m back!

The long version: I’m not really sure if I can explain what happened these past several months. Of course, long slumbers are nothing new around here. There have been numerous periods of inactivity during the course of the five years that I’ve been blogging. If anything, that speaks volumes about the practice itself: that we can survive without it, regardless of how necessary we bloggers sometimes tend to think it is. This virtual life, after all, exists only at the margins of our real lives (at least for most of us).

But at the same time, this virtual life is inextricably a part of our real life, and the latter affects the former. And so my absence can only be blamed on whatever else I’ve been upto! I have received numerous requests from friends (both online and offline) to resume writing here, and I apologize belatedly for (having had to) disappoint them.

In any case, I’m happy to mention highlights from what I have been upto. (This feels like one of those post-”mysterious-disappearence-of-the-author” moments! I’m recalling in particular the charming graphic novel by Eddie Campbell, The Fate of the Artist). This past fall, I decided to enroll in a graduate seminar on literary theory and criticism with a famed professor at the famed institution in my neighborhood. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake, as I didn’t quite anticipate what a disaster it would spell to my schedule, to say the least. Every Monday morning, already sleep-starved and possibly with several hundred pages of reading overdue, I would go to office at 9:00am in the morning. But I’d be hardly able to focus on my work, with the looming specter of class at 5:30pm. After 8 hours at work, and then 2 hours at the class, I’d then rush straight to the other class I had enrolled in: beginning French (oui!). By the time I’d be done, at around 9:30pm, I would be exhausted, upset, and very hungry. And while I’d try to recover for the rest of the week, I also had a ton of homework to finish (boy, those readings!). One particular weekend, I actually stayed up all night at the library before plunging straight into my Monday routine. It wasn’t pretty, I tell you! And then when I had to write the final paper for my class last month, I pulled another all-nighter and called in sick at work, only to realize by the end of the ordeal that I had been in the library for over 18 hours non-stop, without any sleep or food. When I was graduating, I had promised myself never to repeat such collegiate misadventures, if only for the sake of effectiveness, if not health: but clearly, I learned my lesson well!

So that would explain why I wasn’t able to attend to much other than work and school. Thankfully, despite all that, I did manage to complete my applications to some graduate programs–a whole other story in itself, really. I still have a pile of unread issues of the three periodicals I subscribe to (The Atlantic, The Nation, and Islamica), not to mention the alumni magazine from my alma-mater. The rate at which I buy from my usual used book hang-outs haven’t declined at all, so you can imagine the proportion of read and unread material on my shelves. And then there are all those blogs I haven’t visited in months (sorry, guys!).

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about all the things I need/want to blog about, so hopefully I’ll catch up soon!

Late summer last year, when walking out of a mosque in Seattle, I picked up a copy of a local Muslim community magazine. Much of the issue was devoted to summer activities, including swimming. If for some women beaches and bikinis are cause for concern because they feel insecure about “less-than-perfect” bodies, the concern for many Muslim women is perhaps worse: how to swim without revealing the body. Not so surprisingly, therefore, the magazine I was perusing had to also deal with this question, and it was there that I first learned about innovations in this area. Apparently, quite a few Muslim families have been designing their own custom swimwear, made of material appropriate for the water, but also covering as much of the body as they deemed necessary. As someone who takes an occasional interest in the study of fashion (thanks in part to Virginia Postrel’s fascinating monthly column in The Atlantic), I enjoyed learning about the emerging trends in “Muslim swimwear.” Somewhere on the internet a few months later, I found out about the new Australian company Ahiida that is now famous for its trademarked product: the burqini.

There is another reason why I remember that random, small publication. It was from it that I first learned, through a brief review of the religious debates on “what must be covered,” that according to a good number of Islamic scholars, the ‘private’ of the female body, in front of other women, is from the navel to the knees—i.e. the same as is for men. This was new and interesting information, because up until then I was led to understand that even amongst women themselves, the whole of the female body is considered private. Admittedly, though, I wasn’t too surprised, given some familiarity with the historical speculations about medieval Arab women’s clothing.

Anyways: the reason I bring up this topic is because this week’s Time has an interesting piece on the burqini. Apparently, it’s becoming quite the fad for non-Muslim consumers as well. Even Anne Cole approves! Some Muslims, however, aren’t very happy, as the burqini still reveals too many curves; someone reportedly said on ShiaChat.com that it’s “like playing a game with Allah.” Of course, I’m hardly surprised. In fact, I doubt if it would fly in most Muslim countries. I personally know Muslims who don’t even think trousers are halal for women (because they’re “form-fitting”)!

But like they say, you can’t make everyone happy. The burqini has already become a new target for attack in the Islamophobic blogosphere. And apparently some feminists think it’s still a burqa, and hence oppressive. That too is not very surprising. On the Testimonials page in the Ahiida website, I noticed a very telling remark by an Australian woman: “Funny…if it would not be so sad!” Indeed, I can understand how and why in cultures in which exposed skin is perfectly normal, it would seem almost poignant to see some women having to come up with such ‘desperate’ measures. It’s all relative, of course. On a nudist beach, you’ll attract odd stares if you still have shorts on.

And to quote from Time: “Still, in this bare-it-all age of the string bikini, when young girls take wardrobe cues from Paris Hilton and body-image pressure is intense, the Burqini swimsuit is making a statement. And that’s the point, the designers say: the suits allow women, Muslim or not, to choose comfort over conformity.”

(The title, by the way, is not mine. It was used by Slate, from where I discovered the piece in Time).

So said Congressman Keith Ellison last Wednesday, at the Campus Progress National Student Conference in Washington, DC. Ellison definitely rocked the crowd, which included nearly a thousand students. His style is distinctly reminiscent of Martin Luther King, in the tradition of the preacher/activist who asks you to say things like L-O-V-E out loud while also urging you to rise up and act on your urgent political issues. And if Ellison traces the birth of his political consciousness back to the college campus, I’m sure many of us can identify with him. There’s a man to admire and be inspired by. (Previouse posts on Keith Ellison: here and here)

The keynote speaker this year was Nancy Pelosi. I didn’t find her that great a speaker, but she had good things to say. She repeatedly stressed the importance of science (–which was funny coz her microphone kept malfunctioning!). In the context of speaking on the fight against global warming, she mentioned the “moral responsibility” of protecting this planet and this nature, which is “God’s creation.” I thought that was interesting, and I only learned later from a friend that Pelosi is very religious. And my friend suggests that it’s great to have more progressive people of faith in the government. Towards the end of her speech, Pelosi even referred to Pope Benedict XVI, who quoted St. Augustine as saying: “Any government that is not formed to promote justice, is just a gang of thieves.” (On a sidenote, I find it very interesting that Pelosi pronounced Augustine as ah-GUS-tin, which may be the ’smarter’ way to say it, and is also how the British usually say it, if I correctly remember what a medievalist professor of mine once remarked.)

The best session at the conference, by everyone’s opinion, was the foreign policy discussion with illustrious journalist Seymour Hersh, who was interviewed on stage by Asra Nomani. Hersh speaks with incredible wisdom and confidence, even ‘arrogance,’ as Nomani would say! He had an incredible story to share from his work on the My Lai massacre–the incident in which a group of US soldiers had killed over 500 Vietnamese civilians, mainly women and children, within a few hours. The story was broken by Sy Hersh, over a year later, in 1969. Hersh also shared with us a few remarkable anecdotes in connection to his work on the Abu Ghraib scandal. (The video of the session is available online, here; I definitely recommend watching!)

I really wanted to see Senator Russ Feingold (who as you may know was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act back in 2001), but he was the first panelist to speak at 9:00 in the morning, and unfortunately I was a tad late to the conference. I missed most of the panels in the afternoon, both because I was really tired and sleep-starved and because I accompanied my friend’s younger brother for a quick trip to a couple of the museums as it was his first trip to DC (It was wonderful to be back at the National Gallery of Art, and I felt momentarily nostalgic for my great trip last year!). So I unfortunately didn’t manage to attend the panel on “Embedding Feminism”, which featured Jessica Valenti, who blogs at the all-famous feministing.com. Ralph Nader also spoke at a panel, as did John Prendergast. Speaking of Prendergast, they gave each of us a free copy of his recently published book on Darfur, co-authored with Don Cheadle. And there was, of course, the customary free t-shirt and tote bag. Wait, you almost thought that’s the only reason I went to the conference? :-)

I was back at my alma mater last weekend, to take advantage of the Memorial Day holiday and see a number of friends graduate. This was in fact the fourth commencement I’ve been at, including my own and two others that I’d worked for as an usher (which made me wonder, at what point does repetition begin to get on one’s nerves?). Fareed Zakaria turned out to be a good speaker for Class Day, especially since I think Anderson Cooper raised the standards quite high last year. I heard Zakaria speak once before a couple of years ago, also in New Haven (speaking of repetition…!), and despite serious differences in opinion with him, I realize he is incredibly intelligent. On this occasion, aside from recounting a few funny episodes from college, he chose to focus on the topic of immigration, essentially arguing that one of the main reasons why America is so rich and powerful is because it has been the most open country in the world. Bottomline: yay immigration!

The other highlight of the weekend (aside from encountering Tom Friedman and family on the street; no biggie, I was in a class with his daughter) was the pleasant surprise of discovering Monday morning that “some Bangladeshi guy is getting an honorary degree,” to quote my friend. It turned out to be Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder and chairman of BRAC.

While it was still a fairly uneventful trip, I was surprisingly distraught by the time I was on my way back to Boston Monday night. To see your younger friends get to the point where you were yourself at just a few months ago is rather unsettling–it’s a stark reminder that we’re all just getting old. I don’t even think I was this sad at my own graduation. Part of it probably also has to do with wanting to re-live college. It’s a bit strange how nostalgia comes mixed with a strong dose of regret.

Back at work on Tuesday morning, even after a good night’s sleep, I felt still so distraught I was only further taken aback. Of course, the experience is not all novel: it’s the same old “weird to be back feeling.” Even one my colleagues, who’d also just returned that day after being away for two weeks in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and London, felt precisely that. But I also realized why this last trip to New Haven was so particularly disconcerting. Nostalgia is not merely the desire to return back in time, but also back in space. After all, as much as memory is the rather abstract location for the past of time, it is usually an object or a place that triggers memory. Our inability to re-locate that place or object in the ‘right’ time creates the fundamental dissonance we associate with memory.

It is only when I connect the question of perpetual homelessness to the paradoxical experience of ‘homecoming’ that I understand why it is that I feel incredibly sad on nearly every instance of return from a journey. As much as the beginning of every journey carries a certain excitement, it’s end bears with it an inevitable disappointment. The return is not merely sad, but also confusing. Where am I coming back from? Where am I going back to? Where is where?

If one learns to call a place ‘home’ for (only) a certain period of time, what meaning or significance does the place or the concept carry beyond that episode? And I am bound to wonder, what happens when that process is repeated several times for several years in several places over the course of one’s life. If nostalgia is characterized by the inability to return to a desired past, then the perpetually homeless person is perpetually nostalgic, because s/he has nowhere to return. After all, what happens to home when there can be no homecoming? But we must also ask, what is the nature of desire when there is no object of desire? And if the existence of the ‘past’ falls apart like that, then what happens to the future? If the past is (/was) already uncertain, then what about the uncertainty of the future, which is always uncertain, almost by definition? But now I realize, homelessness is not nostalgia. It is amnesia.

Let’s face it: the ‘cosmopolitan’ citizen is fundamentally homeless. S/he is like that person who has lost memory (which is already a double loss–since you remember that which you lost).

But that presents a paradox. Because that means yours truly is both nostalgic and amnesiac.

Of Jordan, not England! Rania al-Abdullah was in town last week, and I had the opportunity, quite by chance, to see her speak at the Kennedy School (Part of the luck involved winning a ticket by lottery!). The event was packed to the brim, and I had fun identifying members of the Jordanian secret service scattered all around, in their incredibly composed demeanor and austere grey suits. I found the talk distinctly catered to a young American audience, with references as wide apart as late night talk show host Conan O’Brien and 19th century philosopher William James (although, incidentally: both Harvard men). I would’ve praised her anonymous speech-writer more than Rania herself, but as was evident from the question and answer session afterwards, she is really quite eloquent (Not that I was expecting otherwise, but after all, our standards tend to be set by the leader of the world’s most powerful nation!). And, by the way, she also has a good sense of humor.