On a journey of becoming an utterly marginal person, one ends up arriving nowhere at all.
Even if you were to stand on the far side of the mirror of truth, the mirror will not show you — it will show someone with a shadow larger than your own. But you won’t be able to say who it is you’re seeing! Who changed the explanation of that scene outside the window, the one that made you lose your pulse in an instant that day? Ask questions, raise questions. The answer will come according to the rules of the authorities. And yet you saw the Mexican boy beaten and bloodied, dragged, and hurled from the second floor onto the ground below. Who beat him? A muscular Palestinian man. In due course the police came — and also left. That is the rule here. Which country have you come from, in the camp? Whichever religion, whichever political arena — wherever world political interests are entangled — the diplomatic reckoning of these matters is carried out with firm consistency.
You are, after all, merely an ordinary artist of Asia. In the papers of those busy safeguarding you here, you are no one at all. When it comes time to decide upon your life, they search meticulously, combing through everything, to dig out political interests — the way you once saw the palash tree cut down and hacked apart because it served no purpose, and in its place a number of fruit trees planted. The way you, simply for being an artist, have all along been easily declared an atheist and thereby erased, uprooted from your own place and country. You can no longer write the name of any place — village, city, capital, or country. What religion, what country, does an artist have anyway?
But the rules of migration certainly won’t run on the weight of your opinion! Just as it wasn’t dependent on your opinion that you came into the world — you were born into that household of Bangladesh’s patriarchal society, where you became a minority more minor than the minority. Wait, let’s see — this isn’t a story of completing a circle, but a story of turning up the volume of that sound, the sound of being flung loose and away from the circle.
On this journey of becoming an utterly marginal person, like me, when I again pack a few essential things into a suitcase and set off running, I am not, in fact, headed toward arriving anywhere at all. A sharp, empty plane, where you or I keep becoming separate. To belong nowhere — to no name, no clan, no country, anywhere — means, in essence, to vanish. Is there anything left, any refuge left to seek, in my life?
You know, the stories of all the world’s women converge tremendously at one point: it is women alone who, abandoning their own place, adapt themselves through the thread of marriage into an entirely different environment. But the pain, the story of deprivation, that accumulates in the process of being displaced under the disguise of social and familial acceptance — that, in the course of time, comes to vanish. As a result, as a marginal person, within the unimaginable explanation of an empty life, one might find one’s own name entered in the ledger of how the political interests of the entire world go spinning round and round.
Growing up in a city touching the lap of the Rupsha River, a child was made to understand that one day Khulna would no longer be our city. Behind a truck full of suitcases huddled together, the girl fell silent, then in wounded pride. Why did she have to leave that city — the city where she first learned to get wet in the rain, first saw the Eid moon, first found a friend? There was no answer known to that, that day. That was the beginning of her first chapter of becoming separate. After that came the vast mismatch between the girl’s language, behavior, and thinking, and the city of her parents. In the way she was received there, layer upon layer of mockery and neglect became bound up with the world’s most primal game — the game that begins with nothing but the silent gaze of exclusion. Tell me, will you then learn, in fear of attack, to fold yourself inward? Tell me, will an infinite empty region be born within you, in whose meadow you will grow desperate, searching endlessly for some support to be able to stand? And yet you do not know that in the history of the world, people have become nomads within their own land, many times over. In struggles organized within power and ethnic discrimination, people may indeed gain a separate state, gain a separate flag — but at a depth far greater than that, people carry forward the deep wound of having gained a border.
Take my own case, if I may say — my father bought land and built a house in a place where all the neighbors speak a different language. Their thinking is different. And yet you don’t know why the people of my father’s own region keep telling you, again and again, ‘We’ll kick you out.’
One has to consider whether the phrase ‘we’ll kick you out’ is a genetic flaw of humankind or a capacity of it. Now, life is no longer confined to the words ‘we’ll kick you out with a boot’ — life now moves directly into ‘we’ll cut off your head.’ Because I am a person within Bangladesh’s patriarchal society who is able to make her own decisions — one who, in her art and culture, writes of human aspiration, writes stories of breaking chains. Day by day, the weeds of fundamentalism, born and growing, one day became an immense tree. There, water, fertilizer, soil were laid down — through the hacking and killing of people like us, made fertile. In continuation of that very process, once again, one day, life’s bundle had to be gathered up and carried away. On that iron journey, the names of many writers, journalists, bloggers, artists, filmmakers, professors, and publishers have been recorded. The day my name was added to the procession of the homeless, the nationless, I did not, in fact, think about how far the world’s road truly stretched. I only knew that the road had lifted me up to be away from home for a long time to come. Perhaps that is what I will say to you, in a whisper!
The crisis of the world’s first displaced people was climatic catastrophe. Those endangered people of Mesopotamia and the Bronze Age, going to Egypt through their struggle to preserve existence — the displacement they underwent there necessarily involved war. And yet, in the minds of countless thoughtful people like me, there remains only one urgency: where can I actually manage to live? At such a time, every kind of bond in life comes loose. What becomes urgent is only the primal will to preserve one’s existence. I saw myself become those very creatures — fish, bees, herds of deer. At what cosmic moment I became one of those who, at any cost, cross boundaries, setting life afloat on ice, in rain, in water, I no longer remember. That the circle of security means, in fact, being trapped — that mystery I came to understand only much later. But I am, after all, a person of this era; in our hands there must remain that chain called the passport. And even that carries its own circuit of codes of conduct and restrictions, varying by country — which means you will no longer see yourself merely as displaced. A colossal spider will go on weaving a fine web all around you, and there, you will no longer be able to feel the swing of life.
By nature’s law, there is such a thing as the migrant, there is meaning to shelter, there is a new definition of love. There is possibility, and there is a far-stretching future. But what the artist has is an unfamiliar, treacherous road, hand carrying one suitcase after another. As a refugee artist, I have not merely crossed borders — I have left behind, in a burning dialogue, the memory of a faint light like countless stars, a place from which no further exchange of words will ever occur. You will want to hear any story of pain, and you will not grow tired of it. But what the refugee artist carries is one long, tedious, monotonous sentence. In the anguished cry that lies between homeland and foreign land, a person keeps getting lost, all the time. As people, you may be able to push me toward exile — but you will not be able to deny my scream, my weeping, the last hidden trace of wounded pride gathered together, and the living-on that is done as much as it is still possible.
When, coming from a country of the warm regions, I first went out to walk alone in the forest wearing an overcoat stuffed with bird feathers, I thought, that day, that this was perhaps the joy of freedom. Everything I had lost growing up, from childhood, as a girl — the joy of gaining all of that back in a single instant was, in fact, made to be forgotten by the identity of refugee. My own shadow was held captive in my father’s claws like a looming demon, at a time when I did not yet know the meaning of patriarchy. I did not know why the strong attack the weak. Why everyone becomes absorbed in the game of denying the exception. Searching for the answers to all such questions, when I finally became a refugee, what I had actually done was merely break one chain only to embrace another.
The day I went to sleep in a place as small as a matchbox, the sky was overcast with clouds. Inside the room, my necessary belongings, looking at me, were thinking: well, why aren’t you sleeping? Look, what a beautiful, damp, damp night. The assurance of safety. Clean water, food, within reach of your hand — then why are you speechless, sleepless?
I could not find myself! Countless unknown thoughts kept spinning through my head. Morning does not come easily on such nights. I know that. Because I had no kitchen or bathroom of my own, I could not simply run and do everything whenever I wished. On top of that, I am Asian. My spices became a nuisance for many. I was tremendously startled one day — I remember it clearly — lentils, rice, and eggplant curry were boiling on the stove, when a Lebanese gentleman suddenly came storming in and threw open the kitchen window with a bang. Since we spoke different languages, there was no conversation with him — I only understood, from his manner, his objection to the smell. This kept happening again, though the next time it wasn’t hidden irritation but an openly, ash-grey furious face — an Albanian woman came rushing in. Whenever I cooked fish, she would report it to the refugee camp authorities. When the pungent smell of my cooking became a source of great unrest for them, I had, little by little, to change my menu. And yet, inside, an incoherent plea kept running: why can I not have a kitchen, anywhere in this world! At that moment, that was my very first wish. Though, yes, for those who had children, there were pleasant family arrangements. Shared cooking and bathing facilities existed for families like mine, without children.
If there is any name for an abnormal place in this world, then you will learn first of all that its name is refugee camp. Here, one must keep one’s eyes open at all times. An artist must either remain absorbed in the search for material to write about, or must cut through practical complications. Practicing, day after day, the balancing of one or the other, when bones finally, decisively, began to sprout skeletal through the body, I grew desperate for yet one more right. And that was sleep. For a little sleep, it felt as though I could sell every drop of blood in my body. A newly bought jar of coffee would then call out, beckoning in fine black granular dark signals — yes, one moment’s lift, but then? That uprooted, stony, real monster would bare its teeth at me. It would widen its eyes and say: as long as the struggle of accepting persists, you will survive here. And yet, in beggarly desperation, I had wanted the right to simply live — not to become a clumped, lifeless, discarded structure.
My neighbor would often steal essential spices and vegetables kept in the kitchen. I would simply swallow the matter. The theft of a little salt, chili, a fresh green stalk of broccoli — this, rather, made her try to understand me as an alien, as someone from some other world. Because taking someone else’s things without permission is, in Europe, almost unheard of. Even though I live within the European atmosphere, I remain confined within the boundary of the uprooted. But in that boxed room with its thin, flimsy wooden walls, the neighbor, slamming the door with tremendous noise again and again, kept stealing my sleep, day after day. The authorities would not, under any circumstances, take the complaint to heart. Even after explaining it gently, in a tone of mild entreaty, the persecution did not stop. Because the reason is very clear: you look different, your language is different, your culture is different — and more different than all of that, you are different in religious practice. There will be many circles formed to persecute you. But even after filing complaints through proper channels to escape the hands of this circle, I was wrongfully threatened with eviction. They would not, under any circumstances, listen to what I had to say. Yes, of course, the Palestinian neighbor’s own people were present in greater number in the camp. And under their veiled influence, I began to grow dim, faded. I used to wish I could flee from my camp life.
The original home of our country’s krishnachura tree is Madagascar. And yet, in our songs, our poetry, woven through our everyday feelings, how much its own it has become. That thought gives me courage. Yes, perhaps one day I will find deliverance from this matchbox life, from these sleepless, absent nights. Standing beside a sliver of a window, I will find my own private afternoon. Self-respect keeps eroding, and yet, however slowly, I keep telling myself: the entire world stands within this very labyrinth of migration. In the midst of the several stages I had to pass through, moving from this phase of impermanence toward gaining permanence, a colorful revolution occurred in my country. Immediately after the fall of the government, there emerged the figure of Yunus, once a Nobel laureate. And yet, behind his polished attire and dazzling language, the situation grew terrible in the lives of the country’s people, through inhuman, cruel persecution. There, the political language, the attacks, the resistance — all of South Asia’s political vocabulary began to change entirely. People grew accustomed to killings, mob violence, and unpolitical conduct. And yet, to the world, the diplomatic accounting of our country began to be transformed into another, altogether miraculous language. In my uprooted life, this too was a breathless, suffocating experience.
When the immigration officers began recording my interview according to procedure, they would ask me, again and again: who is it, exactly, that you are afraid of? Who wants to take your life? Even after I made my statement clear, their one recurring complaint, again and again — whether it even counts as a complaint I don’t know — was that I was, after all, still very much alive. Even though it was from the hand of death itself that I, abandoning attachment to everything, surrendered myself into the register of the uprooted, there exists, for anyone, no instrument to prove this living, breathing agony of mine. In all the official records, the news, and the diplomatic reports, my country has, of course, been shown as an exceedingly safe place. As a result, no one here has much interest in what has happened to my life, or in what is yet to happen, or in anything beyond that. You are an artist, when you go and practice in some unknown place in your own country — there is no longer much cause for fear there for atheists, for free-thinkers — such was the letter I was given, and only a short while after that, in our country, people were being killed for no reason, hung from trees, and burned. Countless people were being driven out of their workplaces in the name of baseless mob action. In that kind of terrified time, I could do nothing but sit reading, on the computer, all the laws and provisions of human rights. But by then, I had already begun to lose the strength needed to cope with the mental strain.
I don’t know who is carrying out journalism with such blindness. I am receiving the punishment for revealing the actual truth, and yet I keep seeing truth, in various ways, becoming the victim of imprisonment. In truth, you will be judged by a concrete idea, precisely when you become the sacrifice offered in worship to some invisible power — let’s call it, say, the geopolitical guillotine. You will see yourself beneath this guillotine only when truth, somewhat dressed up, wears a costume but no longer appears in its own face. Well then — you walk into a bullfighting ring wearing a red shirt, thinking no bull will attack you, because they are no longer bulls at all, they’ve become donkeys! This is what is being made to believe by those who hold in their hands a polished, well-crafted map, in which, at the pinnacle of humanity, your voice as a free-thinking artist is not being considered at all. Because until you have been gored through and through by the bull’s sharp horns, you cannot prove your own death! Who destroyed, in your country, the environment of freedom for artists to write without fear? No matter how much you know the reasoning, the statistics of why it was done, it no longer holds any value. Because whatever that intolerant, uncivil group (Jamaat, Shibir) says, the big players of the geopolitical game have no problem with it at all. Against what they want stand you, and your freedom.
At just such a time, a group of astronauts set off from Earth into space. I watched various images along the path of their destination — a radiant image of Earth itself was released, too. Its beauty was exquisite. I even touched it, with my hand, as much as one can touch a screen. A still closer image of the moon arrived, that too novel — its surface all blistered and pockmarked. And yet, I see that same moon through my window, as though it were a luminous, unnatural sphere of light. Exactly as if it were my own judicial proceedings, only just having taken place. If you lose your way from home these days, there is the GPS system — with that, you can be found. But you have no home, no road, and even those who would search for you do not exist — so tell me, in such a situation, how am I to go on carrying an image of the whole Earth against my chest?
I was rejected outright, in a single stroke, by those particular people in that particular room. ‘Oh, come now — the election has already happened, Jamaat’s people are in parliament through democratic means, you have nothing at all to fear. Freedom of expression now prevails in Bangladesh.’ I came to learn that this uprooted life, this refugee life, is governed by the standard of truth fixed within some political survey sitting in the files of a handful of people. Which is to say — I am not the owner of all the anguished cries, the personal grief and suffering, of my own life. Even the little green that remains after one has been uprooted, even that, an immigration decision can overturn. It seemed to me that the face of the world was like the face of my father — harsh, without justice, without acknowledgment.
Yes — having finished the judicial process of migration, I am now a person free of land.
Floating in emptiness, exactly like those astronauts. Someone far, far away from the Earth. No longer a person enlisted anywhere — neither in homeland nor in foreign land. You want to speak, and yet your voice carries no sound in it. So do you know how that feels? I know how it feels. Now I know everything. If you want ground beneath your feet, if you want to run your life without disturbance, then there is one very simple path: instead of being different, as I am, be like everyone else. This is, in truth, the story of the shattering of black sheep’s lifelines. On this journey of becoming an utterly marginal person, like me, when I again pack a few essential things into a suitcase and set off running, I am not, in fact, headed toward arriving anywhere at all. A sharp, empty plane, where you or I keep becoming separate. To belong nowhere — to no name, no clan, no country, anywhere — means, in essence, to vanish. Is there anything left, any refuge left to seek, in my life?
Oh! Perhaps you have seen, in the celluloid of Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, in its intense anguish, the crisis of existence of the uprooted person — or the anguished cry of wanting to go on living. There will be a disruption in the flowering of your thought; you will discover a fog of vanishing, of becoming invisible, if you go searching for the thread of a life like mine. Rather than that, let me simply tell you — yes, my position is one surrounded by predator-infested beasts and demons. In this moment’s mere living-on, countless furies pierce me.
The deer is its own enemy, because of its own flesh…
Image Credit: Joadl / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
