Comments on: Make believe

By: Anjali

Anjali — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 16:14:00 +0000

Maybe I was too vehement in taking exception to that one sentence in that passage. I didn’t mean to imply that I disagree with the entire quoted passage. Maybe it is more to do with the fact that right now I am working on literature that tries to counteract larger generalizing categories by emphasizing location and geo-cultural specificities.

And now let me contradict what I said earlier (I do this all the time!)– I also feel that while the locational attachments are real, they aren’t enough to link permanently self and place or self and world as we would like them to. So on the one hand I do insist that the place, the culture, the food, etc that one has grown up with stays with one for a long time, but whether one can reach that “kingdom of childhood” ever again is another matter altogether. After all, in looking for our “home,” aren’t we all a little like Ramanujan’s “adopted daughters researching parents /through maiden names / in changing languages…”?

By: Mahmud

Mahmud — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 22:24:00 +0000

I’ve saved that Tomas Wong quote for many years because I liked the prose, liked the ideas, liked his spirit. I’ve wanted to share it with others and thought that this context was one where it could mean something. I quoted it to suggest that there is in each of us, a deep down desire, for “everything we’ve never seen”, for all that we have not been. And yet, sometimes, as for Tomas Wong or the other workers he mentions, the cost may be too high to go for it. For others, make believe may be monetarily lucrative, but you still pay a cost.

And as for Anjali’s disagreement, well, I have long learned you don’t have to agree with everything a fictional, or even a nonfictional, character says. I personally try to avoid saying “everyone,” “always,” “never,” “no one.” But I also know that in the heat of passion, we often say such things forcefully.

Tony’s remark makes sense though it’s one of those ideas that will take me a while to digest. It may well be true, but I’ve long forgotten the rest of Taibo’s novel to really be able to judge.

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 12:24:00 +0000

I understand Anjali’s objection, but I interpret Taibo differently. The idea that nobody is from anywhere is tied, in Taibo’s story, to the idea that everyone is moving somewhere. The steamer, obviously, relates this mobility. But then the working-class struggle also communicates a kind of stifled mobility. The idea that “we all belong to the places we’ve never even been before” forcefully communicates, I think, that we “belong” or are beholden to our “programming,” our desire for the things that we can never have, those things that compel us to work, futilely perhaps, in terrible conditions.
Even our nostalgia for a childhood, as Anjali promotes it, is programmed. We cannot remember, for instance, our earliest days. For that, we rely on family lore.
I too share Anjali’s sentiment about the positive power of childhood to shape our future, though. But despite my vivid recollections, I recognize that my memory is hopelessly shot through with the programming that would inform many of those of my generation.

By: Anjali

Anjali — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 13:35:00 +0000

Great piece, Mahmud! Your statement, “I said that I was not really who I claimed to be” reminded me of one of the short poems of Ramanujan that I have been mulling over lately:

Self-Portrait

I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
despite the well-known laws
of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father. (CP 23)

I also loved the lyricism of that quote by Tomas Wong, but I must disagree with the blanket nature of his statement “nobody’s really from anywhere….What they don’t know is that we all belong to the places we’ve never even been before.” I don’t know–don’t we carry a bit of our childhood home wherever we go? I know that marathi food, the hills surrounding Pune and the cuture of the villages in those hills, the language, etc stay with me and shape my view of the rest of the world. This of course doesn’t mean Pune is only mine or I only of it. But I cannot deny its formative influence on my life. And you too carry so much of your life in Bangladesh with you in your writing, do you not?