The Wheel and the Hook

Passionate about ordinary things, like how ingredients become food – that detail was included in the winning story told at the Moth event I attended last week. The detail was in reference to the storyteller’s friend (the subject of their piece), and I felt a kinship because of that choice; I too am passionate about ordinary things.

The storyteller was actually a Barnard grad. It was some coincidence to walk into a bar in Portland and be identified immediately by this piece of my New York life. On top of that, the story they told was powerful and hit close to home. It seemed closer to fate than coincidence when this person who shared several of my identities got up and told a story about their days on campus that played on the theme of the night: ‘Save’. I wish that I could have snagged them afterward to thank them for telling it, but by then they had disappeared into the night.

Me trying to feed a carrot to a b&w fuzzy llama; I'm trying so hard to get them to like me.

I have been doing a bit of travel lately. Apart from moving back to Seattle from NYC, I have also been visiting friends in common and uncommon places. Several weeks ago, I went to visit my high school friend in Arkansas where he is now teaching. I feel like I’m still processing that brief trip; it was my first time to the South and to a town like Pine Bluff, where the urban decay is so visible. I felt in many ways that I was in the Land of Contradictions, so I’ve been thinking about how to write in a way that really honors that. I’m working on a (more polished) piece about it, so stay tuned.

Last week I was in Portland where my best friend from elementary school lives. We did our usual gallivanting – thrifted for butter dishes and books, saw that amazing Moth Storyslam, adopted a cat. We also went to #realOregon for a sheep to shawl festival that I got very excited about. I’m an avid knitter and also am interested in the political implications of knowing about how we get our clothes (knit and otherwise). I’d never been to a shearing, so watching a llama get its hair taken off was actually super interesting.

But perhaps the best part was seeing people spin yarn out of fiber using nothing more than drop spindle. For some reason I thought that you needed the big machinery of a loom in order to spin yarn, but it appears that for a more traditional practice you only need a funny looking little wheel on a hook. As my friend remarked, it really does make you think about all the effort that goes into making a garment by hand. Sure, we do have factories now and different processes are more automated, but there are still so many hands that go into making the things that we buy (much too cheaply for the labor, I might add).

I’ve been thinking a lot about things that we take for granted: clothes, food, safety. Coming back from the trip, I found myself reading Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive and Googling restorative justice programs. I don’t yet have a clear picture of what I’ll do with all this information – for instance, even though I now possess a drop spindle, I doubt I’ll start making all my clothes by hand. But at the event, I felt humbled and encouraged by the storyteller’s rendering of their friend’s life. Through their use of language, they elevated the ordinary and left me chewing on ideas of how to do the same.

Bideshe Amra Bangladeshis: Celebrating Independence Day in Diaspora

I recorded my boro chacha’s stories about the Liberation War one hot summer afternoon in the village house in Kushtia. We went into his private room with the fan turned on, but it was still sweltering; every few seconds I would swat at a giant fly that had swirled in too close to the recorder, or a baby would come toddling in for my boro chacha’s attention. But this was the last day we would spend in the village, and I knew that, despite the distractions, we had to finish.

Boro chacha is known as the “hothead” of our family – a label I also take after. It’s said that he couldn’t stand to be anywhere that compromised his values, which sometimes left him jobless. He was serving in the army in West Pakistan when the war broke out. So he disappeared. He deserted the army, changed his name, and hopped trains until he showed up out of the forest at the door of our village home. There were no reliable communication lines, so my family describes his arrival like the appearance of a ghost. Boro chacha takes pride in speaking Urdu so well that it allowed him to escape. He wasted no time at home though. A few weeks later, he left again – this time to serve in the liberation army.

My boro chacha is a wiry man in his seventies now, wearing a lungi and a long grey beard. I have my sister with me as we talk, and she will also do the written translation work afterwards. I feel embarrassed that I cannot understand it myself; I do not know enough Bengali to hear this story from boro chacha’s own mouth.

I found my connection to Bangladesh when I was fourteen: the year I found out I was adopted. It wasn’t part of the plan – my white adoptive mother spilled the beans. It was within the family; my Bengali adoptive father brought me into the U.S. when his sister could not take care of me in Bangladesh. I became a child of diaspora by a twist of fate.

Even once I knew about the adoption and having another family somewhere, I still wasn’t “connected.” I didn’t live in a Bengali community and I didn’t know how to find one in Seattle, where I grew up. Even my dreams of being reunited with family were in sepia tones; I couldn’t imagine Bangladesh as anything but a dusty set of buildings and brown faces. The first time I had any contact with my biological family was in college – when my biological sister found me on Facebook. I became consumed with trying to visit, finally convincing my father that we needed to make the trip in my sophomore year.

I was then able to fill in the colors and sounds – the loud honking of horns in Dhaka streets and the bright salwaars that are the day-to-day wear of women in every class. I was, however, virtually unable to communicate. Despite finally being part of the ethnic majority, I was handicapped by my lack of language skills and had to be led everywhere by my sister. Still, I felt more connected there than anywhere else I have lived. When I had to return to snowy New York for the rest of my semester, only the determination that I would go back helped me to survive through that year.

I asked my father during one of our more recent marathon phone calls: “Have you ever felt conflicted about your identity now that you’ve lived so long in the U.S.?”

“No,” he said, not missing a beat, “I am always a Bangladeshi man – at best, I am an expatriate.” An expatriate. Like the Brits in our country. Not the stereotyped immigrant who has to relinquish all loyalty to their previous homeland for citizenship. No worries about weakening ties. Not a hint of hesitation.

I am jealous of my father’s stability. His feet are firmly planted not only in Bangladesh soil but specifically in our village home in Kushtia, though he has not been back there for more than a few days out of ten years. He knows where he is from.

Celebrating Bangladesh Independence Day feels different when your heritage is more fragile, when you never feel “Bengali enough.” Most days, I don’t feel “American enough” because of how often I am asked to comment on “India” or “South Asia” – just another variation on “where are you really from?” But on this day, I am reminded that although I take immense pride in Bengali literature, I cannot yet read it. On this day, I am reminded that despite my loyal lineage, I feel I am still crashing someone else’s party.

The second time I went back to Bangladesh, I decided I had to collect stories. I begged my Amma, my biological mother, to teach me our language from books for kids in class 1 and 2. I tried to soak in all the family legends and wrote pages and pages of description as if the memories would fall out of my head once I landed on U.S. territory. My curiosity – and insecurity – has pushed me to take classes and read endless articles and books on Bangladesh while I am away. And slowly, ever so slowly, I am getting plugged in to the radical Bengali community that exists in the U.S.

As I turned off the tape recorder, stories in hand, I realized I am still trying to define where I fit into this narrative of national origins. This is a day of recognition: recognition of our pain and struggle, and of our victory. Achieving independence meant defining ourselves by separation: here is what we are not. Now, more than forty years later, we are still defining what we are. It is tempting to feel trapped in insecurities, but on this day I will be gentle. “Once a Bangladeshi, always a Bangladeshi,” my father would say. I am filling in the details of my own story along the way.

Tiny Heroes

When you're a kid, you cherry-pick the best stories about your family to make them seem grand.

I'm still seduced by the tales of immediate family having hijacked trains and defected from the army, given the first contraception lessons in the village or immigrating across multiple continents. As a result, some of my own life goals are patterned in the same way. Fascination with mastering practical skills? There. Calling to work in crisis management? Check. Pressure to learn more than three languages? On the list. (My sister, on the other hand, prefers to sleep.)

Despite my best efforts, I am still a macro-planner at heart. To use Zadie Smith's metaphors, I do not build a narrative linearly, and that includes the narrative of my life. When I unravel and cast on yet another string of words, I can see this constructed family is a holdover from learning about them relatively late. As an adoptee, I only had the benefit of hearing these stories far after they had become legend. And I have been writing about them ever since. Sometimes they come as ghosts and narrators in my fiction, but most of the time they come as incomplete thoughts in my journals that I never get around to fleshing out.

What are we to do with these pieces of our stories that do not knit up tightly? My father has always talked to me about the shape of things: you have the contours, so the details will fill themselves in. This goes for everything from filing taxes to building a writing career. His own immigration story embodies this - there were no certainties but for the shape of "coming to America." Only in retrospect does it look like a smooth transition from the "First Boy" in the village to the expatriate Bangladeshi man on the far side of the United States. Taking his example as I pass through this transitional time post-grad, I can also see that some things will eventually get smoothed out in the re-telling.

Instead of heroics, I've lately been performing skillful surgery on bell peppers and embarrassing myself in front of teenagers. Most of my heroism is exhibited in providing a listening ear and a plate of food. I remember how quiet and undervalued this work has become. How the best part of my family's stories are not always the grandest ones, but the ones that continue to unfold. My Amma acting as matriarch of the family, finely dicing onions on the bhoti. My cousin celebrating a new baby. These are the mundane triumphs that set me to my pen each day writing and re-writing stories about caregivers and South Asian women - groups of tiny heroes that in my life often overlap.

Friday Fiction: A Distant View

Here is a quick-writing experiment I did with describing scenery through a child's perspective.

The houses turned to tiny islands whenever it was rainy season. They flooded the fields, fortified the side walls, and hunkered down under tin roofs to listen to the plink plink and gush of raindrops, signaling that Allah had blessed them again. Selena snapped pictures from the car window and stared. They swung around busses and telegaris with ease, but the rain impeded their progress nevertheless. Gullies of brown much bubbled up from the potholes and unpaved streets, forcing everyone to slow down. IT was safer this way, her father claimed, but her cousin sighed loudly that they weren't going fast enough and that there would be tons of traffic up ahead. Everyone else was asleep. Selena imagined that the tiny islands contained just as tiny people, living out their tiny lives at a great distance from the city where they lived. She wondered how the children got to school when their houses were surrounded by water. Maybe these villages didn't have any children. Only the tallest stalks poked out from above the water line - jute and strong-willed plants, her father said, rice stayed submerged for the majority of its growth. When they visited their village, most of her friends' families kept chickens and goats, to whom they fed grass and leftover meals to. Only people ate rice, so Selena didn't know why they had to have so much of it. The watery fields seemed to stretch on forever.

Friday Fiction: A Few Sentences

 This Friday Fiction is (mercifully) short, as to test out the power of a few sentences - enjoy!

She watched the bubbles escape from her nose and break for the surface, making tiny rainbows with the light from the sun. It would be so easy, she thought, to just keep pushing downward and let all the air release from her lungs until she became some half-living thing. She would drift from bank to bank unhurried, making her way slowly downstream towards the fishermens' nets.

But she resurfaced.

Saturday Fiction: The Other Villagers

 
Ok, so it's technically a little late to be called Friday Fiction, but if you'll forgive me a few hours, here's the start of my next writing project:

Friday Fiction: Hand (A Bird in the...)

Going with a trend on Twitter, I'm going to start posting some of my fiction work on - you guessed it - Fridays. Here's the first installment of a short story that I'm working on:

When the moment was right, Sera snatched the paper crane right out of Sister's hand.

Indifferent to the gasp and then wail of surprise that followed, she ran fast, the green colored paper shining in the glow of full sunlight, as she heard the clomp clomp of little shoes - Sister and Sister's friend - beating down the grass behind her. Faster! She sprinted, weaving away into the small copse of trees at the edge of their backyard, where the old post marked the start of unsafe territory. A broad grey cloud covered the sun. She could no longer hear the footsteps, but she continued running, looking down at her crumpled prize and then around at the gnarled trees that looked like goblin men.

Writing Live: Nuyorican Poet's Cafe and The Moth

Last week, I had the fabulous opportunity to attend not one, but two literary events in NYC: The Nuyorican Poet's Cafe Friday night slam and The Moth's StorySlam at the Brooklyn Museum. After getting a healthy dose of Snoop Dogg, I took a 180 degree turn in my live entertainment consumption. And, to put it mildly, it was amazing.

As writers everywhere know, most of the time our work will not be read aloud. We will not be asked to come on television or the radio and act out our pieces - nor would most of us want to. The boundary between spoken and written word is not often crossed: we are writers or speakers, but there is an inherent challenge in being both. In these two spaces, however, so many people proved that they could bridge the divide with fantastic results. And - equally amazing - they attracted major crowds! Although it is often said that literature is dying and the printed word is on its way out, you wouldn't know it from the audience at both slams. And that's essentially what I wanted to get before I left for summer - an energizing reminder that writers were and still are appreciated for their work, which is not just for themselves, but for all those listeners and readers out there that appreciate them too. Here is a brief recap of both events and their impact on me.

Just Visiting

Jezabelle threw her needles across the chair and hurled herself down after them. The faint scent of his cigarette breath was still on the pillows. She tossed them away and sighed.
She was lonely.
There was no other way to say it, no sugarcoated term to make everything better - all the girls had figured it out by now and she just looked like an idiot whenever she denied it. "Have a date for Valentine's, Jez? Going to find that special someone this year?" No no, she would say, dropping a stitch and picking it up almost without thinking, there was no one in her life.
She snatched up the lime green pillow and looked at its fibers. Woven, something like tweed or another one of those fabrics that she rarely clutched between her fingers. They had kept the smell of him quite well, though she didn't know why. Maybe he'd laid claim to them when he started sleeping in the living room rather than their double bed. The perfect life she would no longer have.
Jezabelle's fiance had come and gone, leaving only a few blackened stains in her carpet. It wasn't like she'd had a chance to really recuperate. She had resolved to try dating again a few weeks after they broke it off... and then a few more weeks after... and then a month...
She bundled her knees up under her chin and sat with her eyes fixed on the knitting closet. Was this the consolation prize? The Charmant Knitter's Guild where she found nothing but happy mothers and young sweethearts? Where no one was without a man for more than two weekends? She glanced over at the knitting needles and the line of red yarn trailing from them like a stain.


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Is That Why We Do It?

As a writer, I am constantly filling up pages and pages and files and files and scraps and scraps of notes, poems, memories, paragraphs and stories. I guess I don't think about it too much at the time, because I always feel that there is something propelling me forward into the next sentence or the next line [and when I don't - a.k.a. writer's block - then I try to drudge myself out and push on into another creative form] but I just wonder, why?
Why do we always feel this need to keep filling the pages? What really is the motivation to take notes about the guy with the crumpled hat sitting next to us with a huge gash on his left arm, laughing happily as he gets off at the next bus stop? I may never know.
But, I guess, my theory so far is that it's our way of interpreting the world. Numerous times I have told myself that without writing I would probably explode, or implode, or something catastrophic like that. Even when everything seems quite ludicrous, I take up pen and paper and develop some sort of scenario far better than myself. In the end, my only purpose is to write.
When I was younger - working diligently on a novel or trying to learn my craft without the fear of rejection - I was much more eager to show the world. I guess that kind of changed when I discovered a. that what I was writing wasn't very good, b. that there are a lot of things I wouldn't share with anyone, and c. that sometimes it's just fine to leave the words on the page. I've recently picked up my favorite writing mentor's (Monica Wood) new sequel to The Pocket Muse and it has really helped me out of a few jams. Just thinking that I am pretty young and all these experiences are part of my life as a writer: they don't have to be public property yet.
I was just thinking about it today, for no reason, but I guess the reason I write is to timidly set down my inhibitions. In a lot of ways, it helped me grow up and grow out, and I guess that the only gift I can give back is to keep putting words down.
I was actually wondering if I could finish every story fragment I had ever written and, well, I realized it was quite impossible.
So, I guess my goal this year [and hopefully every year] is... to actually finish something. Anything. Anything at all that seems to feel right then, right now. It's time to stop worrying about the future.