Posted by Last weekend, I had Primanti’s iftar with an old friend who was in town. He asked me if/how connected I feel to the motherland. I do, I feel at least to a larger degree than most non-nationals.
But one of the things that has helped me feel a connection to the motherland is familiarity through travel. Over a span of a decade, from 1996-2007, I think I visited Bangladesh about 5 times. Each visit was different but each time I felt more familiar with the country. When you visit the motherland, it’s natural that relatives will invite you out to numerous, numerous dawats (translate: dinner parties). Those occasions helped me to see my cousins and nieces and nephews as real people and not just abstractions whose grades my parents bragged about over the years.
At the same time, my parents also ran interference to make sure that dawatland didn’t take over our visits. We did touristy things and tried to experience the country, not necessarily the way that locals do but in a way to try to understand its ethos. For me, that connection comes through food and history and geography. We visited places like Sriti Shodho (National Martyr’s Monument), Mainamati, Ahsan Manzil, Lalbagh Fortress, the Feni Lock & Dam project and my personal favorite, Sitakunda Ashram in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. We went on a boat ride with my Saif unkel. We went to the annual Boi Mela (book fair), my father’s favorite thing to do.
My father took us to the spot at Dhaka University where he participated in the Language Movement protests against the West Pakistani government. And no trip back to the motherland is complete without visiting my dad’s village, Barahipur, a tranquil, idyllic place if ever there was one. As we did all these excursions and dawats, I think it was possible to gain a sense of familiarity, to attempt to see a place for the way its residents live it even if we didn’t live that way.
My friend hasn’t been back in many, many years; to the point where his connection is attenuated. If he (and his lovely new wife) went to the motherlands, they might get swallowed up by dawatland. It would be, after all, their first trip back as married folks. Going sans parents or attempting to carve out their own experience of the countries would be practically impossible.
However a person makes a connection, it has to be worked at. My language skills stink so I’ve endeavored to build one via cuisine and studying history. But living the connection is important… to see those monuments and the rivers (and to try to avoid the stink of ripe katthal).
It’s a difficult thing to build a connection to such a remote region. A couple weeks ago, a separate friend of mine made the point that it was rather unrealistic of her parents to expect that she be the goodlittletraditionalbrowngirl when, in reality, that wasn’t her experience growing up. She’s not some whitewashed coconut rebel but she didn’t grow up in Jackson Heights either. How can we or our parents expect ourselves to create a connection or obey certain norms and customs when we have little practical experience within that tradition.
