Last night I returned from a brief trip to what is called my desher bari--which in the awkward literal translation would mean “country house,” but is better understood as one’s native village or hometown. It is the Bengali version of where one is really from, and although to the outside world we’re all basically just from this one tiny country, among ourselves our locale of origin makes a lot of difference. ”Where’s your desher bari?” is thus often among the first things one would ask on meeting a fellow Bangladeshi. I’ve found myself as intrigued when I’ve occasionally faced the question even in America, as I used to be when, growing up in the Middle East, I would observe my dad bring it up with friendly strangers from the motherland. Replies to the question may sometimes be even more interesting, as one might try to further clarify his or her father’s and mother’s respective desher baris.
I think this quintessential Bengali concept may have begun to loose some significance for groups/generations of people born and raised in the big city, or even outside the nation. For me, however, the problem has usually been more in trying to accurately translate what desher bari could mean exactly. (more…)
Filed under: Autobiographic
On the spur of the moment, I just decided to write here again right now. While the thought has of course come up occasionally, I guess this time it has actually materialized. I don’t know if it’s an odd and inadvertent patterning that it has been exactly a year since my last appearence on June 22nd, 2009. And interestingly enough, the one time I nearly came back to post happened to be exactly six months ago: I have a saved draft, dated December 21, when I began: Everytime I return here after an unannounced hiatus, I debate on how to re-start, how much to recount. It’s as if I’m always playing catch up, wanting to make sure that the narrative thread does not get cut off. I don’t even know why I assume there is a thread of continuity. The only continuity I know is myself, even which I’m often confused about.
In any case, I’m not here to try and find silly patterns and meaning where there is none. And yet I cannot but mention, since it did cross my mind, that I now happen to be sitting in the very room where I first began to blog just over eight years ago. Lest that imply a false sense of continuity, I need only reflect on where all I’ve been, what all I’ve done and who all I’ve become in these long years. But yes, I am home, although honestly I don’t know if I still think of it as “home” any more.
A few days ago, a friend of a friend who is visiting the country for the summer asked me how I deal with coming back here, whether I feel like I really belong. Of course, neither of us knew where we really belong and we reflected on our shared experience of diaspora in America. It was intriguing to hear her talk about the first time she went back to Beijing after many years: a moment she had mentally enacted again and again, but when it finally came she was unprepared for the shock of realizing that both she and her hometown had become so different.
My trips back to Bangladesh have been accompanied by a similar recognition, or perhaps I should say misrecognition. It really is a bit of a paradoxical situation when I remember and therefore reconnect with the place where I grew up, but thereby also realize how distant I have become from it: a distance both literal and temporal. The paradox lies also in the double bind of continuity and discontinuity: the place that is, both is and isn’t the the place that it was; the I that am, both is and isn’t the I that was. And so if every act of remembering is an attempt to reattach our dismembered selves back to where it used to belong, isn’t it always already a failure, merely a longing to be?
Last week, I met up with two of my best friends from high school, and for much of the time I was quietly overwhelmed by a familiar but oddly intense sense of nostalgia that I didn’t quite know how to react to. At some point, as they argued over what to order at the cafe, I remarked: “you guys haven’t changed!” This made them both laugh, but then I began to wonder why I said that. After all, so much has changed, even though they are still young and beautiful and so much like how I remembered us and our friendship. Maybe it’s still taking some getting used-to, that we’ve come a long way, with our respective lives, careers, and for some even spouses. I suppose we’re perpetually still getting used to growing up, and perhaps nostalgia is no more than a mere coping mechanism? Oh well, c’est la vie.
This is a very short film on Gaza made by the animator of Waltz with Bashir (which I briefly mentioned before, but hope to talk about a bit more sometime, especially in light of a critical review that has been circulating recently).
The war on Gaza that marked the beginning of this year was a deeply traumatic moment in the lives of many of us, and affected me in ways that I may not have yet fully recovered from. If I have been relatively silent on the matter, that may have more to do with psychic repression, than with mere neglect. Of course, each of us experience the world in our own ways, even as we converge, and there’s no denial that a particular set of circumstances defined my particular experience of the war–of which I am still trying to make sense. But as I had confessed to a friend one night back in the middle of January, when the smokes were still suspended in the Gaza sky, I was feeling guilty for even being alive. How does one make sense of life, when life has torn to shreds any sense of justice that one may have grown up with? Which made me realize, that this maybe as much about coming-of-age as, say, empathy. It is as if we are still growing up, still coming to terms with a world we thought we knew, but apparently do not. Perhaps the utopia of peace that so many of us dream about and obsess over is no more than a nostalgia for a lost childhood innocence, to which we will obviously never return.
Yet we stil refuse to give up, on meaning. And are still trying to make sense of insensible wars. This, in fact, may be the very problem: that we are plagued by existential crises when the very existence of some people are denied, without negotiation–the very real people who die very real deaths, thanks to war in the age of mechanical destruction. Why them; why not us? I feel guilty to even be alive.
Earlier today, a friend and I were feeling rather strange as we left the theater, not knowing how exactly to react to the movie we had just seen: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. My friend suggested that we never again complain about getting older. But if there’s one thing I kept thinking about throughout the movie, it was the question of memory. How can we explain the curious role of memory in a life lived backward in terms of age? Or for that matter, how exactly to explain the role of memory in our own lives?
It is, of course, something that I always think about, perhaps even more so due to my academic interest in history. A few days ago, as I was walking out of another theater after Waltz with Bashir, another friend was asking about the main message of the movie, with respect to the Sabra & Shatila massacre. I responded that for me, even as the film was overtly political, it essentially had to do with memory, since the narrative was structured by the protagonist’s and his fellow Israelis’ efforts to remember their experience as young soldiers at war in Lebanon. I was deeply moved by the movie in many complex ways, but the question that continued to haunt me as I walked home that night was: what does it mean for me to “remember” a massacre that took place exactly two weeks before I was born to life.
These musings on memory were basically what brought me back to this blog today after months of inactivity. I had, of course, been contemplating a return, even as I had consciously put it off until after the end of my Fall semester. But I have often surprised myself with the realization that weeks would go by without me thinking for once about this blog, or even the blogosphere in general: which can only indicate how inessential it is to my life. But that does not mean that I have not remembered it at all or haven’t been reminded of it–as I indeed have been by a couple of friends, both real and virtual. That also brings up the one big change since my last entry on these pages, and that is that I am in school again. As I may have written before on a similar return from hiatus, if our writings on blogs say something about the state of our lives, then our absence from them says just as much. In my case, it’s about the state of being a student: the late nights in the library, the long, often hurried, walks across campus, the meetings with more new people than you can remember the names of, the frantic efforts to finish overdue papers, and of course the worries about food, shelter, and money.
Despite the occasional amnesia, I have never doubted that I will return to blogging. I did, however, question myself. To figure out whether I really wanted this blog to continue to be a part of my life. The answer is yes, and for various reasons that don’t need attention now. But there is one that I could mention, and that has to do with the many interesting people and their writings that I have discovered through the blogosphere. I wanted to acknowledge that, because I often recall how much I have learned from here. I could not possibly recount the number of times that, in the course of a serious discussion with friends or even professors, I have referred to something I read in a blog or learned from a discussion inspired by a post either on my own or someone else’s blog. These citations can sometimes get rather awkward, when I don’t want to out the fact that I blog–anonymously, sort of.
In any case, I do hope I don’t disappear again. With school starting again in just a couple of days, that may be more just wishful thinking, but I can at least promise to try and remember. Although for all my talk of remembrance, I have to say I was struck by the irony of the fact that as I sat in front of the computer today ready to blog again, I had to stare at the monitor and think hard for almost a minute before I could remember that the website is called wordpress.com.
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. (more…)
