Mizan Rahman,
It all
seems like yesterday. I had come to this country with my heart filled with
hopes and dreams. Higher education, a specialist’s expertise, a top-notch
degree ----the possibilities seemed endless. I’d go back to my country, I
mused, offer her the fruits of my training here. That was the unshakable
resolve of my youth.
And then, God knows how, thirty years of my
life rolled along, and I am still here, firmly settled in an alien country.
I had entered Canada as a student, but in
three months I was able to afford a television. The manager of my bank
sweet-talked me into taking a loan to buy a brand new car. Commuting problems came
in handy as a convenient excuse. I was the same fellow who in his student days
couldn’t afford a ride on rickshaws, and took 3-mile hikes every day to save up
on bus-fares. For one who had never seen the inside of a private automobile, a
private car had suddenly become an absolute must.
I recall that in our old home in a crowded
corner of the old town in Dhaka, there was no electricity, no running water,
radio or stereo record-player. Yet within 3 months of leaving the country it
became impossible to contemplate life without television. The shy,
self-conscious country-boy----I----became overwhelmed by western goods and
luxuries. My hands were filled with the bounty of a triumphant consumer
society, and I was a bit like a destitute who fled a famine and was having his
first taste of a feast.
I got
my degree rather quickly. Since childhood I heard myself called ‘smart’ so
often that a time came when I actually began to believe it. The easily acquired
degree helped fan my vanity. My head swam in wildly presumptuous thoughts. The
absurd notion of having perhaps in my possession something very original to say
in the rarefied arena of international academic world piqued my pride.
I crafted an implausible excuse for not
returning home right away: I have to stay in Canada for a little longer, I told
myself, to gain valuable research experience; I have to build a reputation by
publishing in the leading professional journals of the West-----and this, in
turn, will of course bring further glory to my country.
Then one day, when I do return to my poor
country with mounds of knowledge and experience, what an earth-shaking day will
it be! Perhaps huge crowds of admiring countrymen would line up to welcome me
home with flowers and garlands, schools and colleges would declare a holiday to
celebrate the home-coming of an illustrious son of the land. The son of the
soil had returned, everyone would say, and he has brought pride and honor for
the country.
That shy,
self-conscious youth’s head had begun to spin.
You know something?
Amazingly, inexplicably, none of those things ever happened in the last thirty
years. I’m still here, still cooking up excuses and spinning the colorful tales
to tell my fellow travelers.
But one thing is perfectly clear in my mind
now. No doubt about that, no doubt whatsoever. Maybe some second thoughts, some
lingering questions, but doubts? None. No lingering doubts any more in my mind
that countless millions of ‘bright’ chaps like me are roaming the streets of this
world everywhere, every day. That I’m not, and had never been, a unique person
in any way. I am firmly stuck with the stark reality that in the name of the
so-called sacrifice for my country, what I really came here for is enjoy the
good life and share it with no one. No illusion anymore that it is not my
country that lost me, but it is I who lost a country. The realization has, at
long last, dawned on me that my homeland was never truly poor, that it was I, laden
with the yoke of poverty. Not in clothes, of course, nor in food and material
goods, but in my mind. The poverty that is supposed to elevate a person to the
vaulted status of Jesus Christ, as the poet said, the same poverty has given me
nothing but mental decrepitude and a blind craving for wealth and luxury.
Sometimes I get a creepy feeling that my homeland was lucky that I didn’t
return.
Today, I feel I have
but one true identity that isn’t fake, isn’t tainted or altered in any way-----
that I am just an aging expatriate, that I am a venerable personality in the
eyes of the newcomers, the wide-eyed fresh arrivals to this land of dreams,
from the same wretched swath of marshy waste far in the East where I came from.
They look at me with a sense of awe and wonder-----God! You have been here so
long? Almost an entire lifetime!
Yes, almost a
lifetime. Yet, I have no desire to go on living with that identity in my wallet
anymore. There is a longing for something else. Some other, real, identity. Something that has a
meaning, an authenticity, that sounds right in the ear, feels right in the
heart. Who am I, really, I used to ask myself often when I was younger, when my
stars were still in a rising phase. Usually I had no problem finding a suitable
answer to that eternal question that has troubled many a saint through
millennia. But not anymore I am so sure of myself----not in the least. Today
I’m not sure which is closer to the truth: a Bangladeshi or a Canadian? What am I, really? One mind is tempted to assert: both, of
course. My birth-place is Bangladesh-----so that is where my heart belongs, and
always will. But it is Canada where I spent most of my life, where I finally
found a sense of permanence, a sense of continuity. I carry a Canadian passport
with great pride and self-assurance. Maybe I would like to be buried in the
soil of Bangladesh but it is the maternity wings of Canadian hospitals where my
children were born. They grew up to learn ice-hockey, the great Canadian game,
to go out skating and skiing with friends in deep winter. I’d take them to
Ottawa’s football games, cheered with them wildly when the home-team scored a
touchdown, cheered for the Montreal Expos and Toronto Maple Leafs before the
Senators, the local NHL team that we are all so proud of. I flaunted the
Canadian maple leaf flag with childish glee and joy on the first of July, our
great Independence Day, every year. So, what do all these prove? That I am
a Canadian. A Bangladeshi Canadian, to
be sure.
And yet, today I do
not feel a great deal of conviction in that bold proclamation of mine. Isn’t it
closer to the truth that I am neither? Neither a Bangladeshi nor a
Canadian? Isn’t it the sublime truth of
human condition that once you trade your own home for what you think a better
home in some dreamland of yours you actually end up being a homeless person
forever? It will, of course, be far easier for my children to accept Canada as
their natural home, but I’m not too sure of that either. Deep inside they may
be having some conflicting thoughts as well.
A few years before a
gentleman came along to attend a seminar we organized in Ottawa. There I raised
some of the questions I just mentioned here, and were troubling my mind quite a
bit at that time. He rose to voice his strong disagreement with my views,
claiming that he, like me, had been a long-time
immigrant to this country, but unlike me has had absolutely no trouble
getting integrated with the host society. He cited as example of his
“integration” the close relationship he and his family in the Maritimes has
been able to forge with his neighbors-----how openly and freely they address
each other in their first names, how they go out on skating and skiing trips
together, have birthday parties together, invite and get invited to each
other’s cottages, share the same bar-b-cues. Commendable, no doubt, but I
thought there is more to what I call true “integration” than doing the fun
stuff together and using each other’s first names. Integration is like
transplantation of an entire culture, of the mindset, of the way you think,
feel, speak, act and react. It is the whole baggage------which I think is never
possible in one generation. Curiously though, the gentleman from the Maritimes,
despite his insistent claim on total integration, became quite agitated with me
for having expressed a view contrary
to his own, a reaction that I thought betrayed his assumed ‘Canadian’-ness,
because as far as I know, born Canadians
do not usually react in that manner.
The truth of the
matter is, as far as my own experience is concerned, I’m yet to meet a
Bangladeshi whose child never came home with a broken nose or a bruised elbow following
a beating by bullies in the school yard, or a Bengali lady who was not laughed
at for her colorful sari or a Sikh
gentleman’s turban didn’t become the butt of vulgar comments by the local
thugs. Or anyone who didn’t have to endure the insulting slur ‘Paki’ , or suffer the indignities of
cold shoulders from racist neighbors. There will never be a lack of people to
remind us how different we are from them, obviously the superior race. They
will not feel too embarrassed to remind you at every available opportunity that
you are not quite as welcome in this land as you think you are. Perhaps my next
generation will be able to adapt better and integrate much more easily than my
generation. Admittedly I enjoy enormous physical and political security than what
I’d have in my own country. But what about my mental state? My heart? Where do I find a place to hide my
face, and merge with the host society just as easily as the white Europeans do? Pity these questions didn’t arise in mind
when there was time ----time to turn the clock back.
If only I could break free from the mental
deficit that I just alluded to. Perhaps then I could take the right decision at
the right time. Then, maybe, just maybe, I would be really worth something,
something that I could offer my country to help make it a better place for
future generations. I’d feel immensely good about being in a position to offer
something to my poor country, which would in turn enrich me many times over.
But alas! What did I do instead? I set
sail for an unknown and potentially unfriendly place, and put the anchors down
where there was no spontaneous voice of welcome. I left my homeland, foolishly
burning all the bridges behind, for the lure a place where the moon is as pale
as a silver platter, where there are no miles and miles of rich, green paddy
fields swinging as if in a symphonic swoon, where people do not treasure their
memories, no empty hearts to sing in the melancholy rain of vadra. I set up my permanent residence
in a place where the night critters do not screech in the backyard, the birds
do not keep singing away incessantly over the thick bamboo bushes in the
villages, the magnificent blossoms of
brilliantly red krishnochuras do not
send the midday skies of the city of Dhaka into a frenzied ecstasy.
Oh, how I miss those
village girls breaking out in enchanted chorus of ulus in the twilight hours,
with time hanging still on the empty fields of late autumn. How utterly lonely
I feel when the rain touches the windows in
my bedroom reminding me of the monsoon flood that would invariably lure
me out with a fishing rod in my hand, hoping to catch a live fish in the front yard
turned a river by the torrent of angry water. Today I find no way of returning
to that enchanted world of mine, that fleeting piece of heavenly bliss that
only my impoverished country could provide. I was lured away by the glare of my
career, of goods and glories. I traded the soul with the lure of comfort and
security. Which I got enough of, but lost the core of my existence in the
process.
Today I sit alone in
my solitary porch in the backyard and ask the hard question that I evaded for
so long: do I have any right to claim that I am a Bangladeshi? Or, for that
matter, have I really earned the right to claim my ownership on the
Canadian-ness either? I have reached near the end of my life. Finally, I seem
to have clear answer to both questions-----no! An unequivocal, resounding no. I
urge you, anyone who is sitting in your solitary porch, to challenge yourself
with the same troubling question. Do you
think you have earned the rights?
Ottawa,
1 July,’12
( Translated by the author from one of his Bengali pieces by
the same name that appeared in Tirtho
Amar Gram, his first anthology of columns, published in January, 1994, that also appeared at various times in Mashik
Bangladesh, Weekly Probashi, as well as monthly magazine Amra, during the early
nineties.)
মীজান রহমান, Mizan Rahman,
No comments:
Post a Comment