Web Write-up Abed Chaudhury

Our Diaspora; the Nation beyond the shores

Abed Chaudhury

I met Fawzul Azim on the platform of a Parisian metro station.  A repair was going on in the St. Michel station not far from Sorbonne and as I descended from the train we were ushered into an alternate route.  Soon a queue developed which backed into the platform.  Moody French nerve took over and soon people were shrugging, gesticulating wildly, and hissing annoyances and expletives like “C’est folie”, “C’est Bizarre” and “Merde!”…  In the middle of this entire melee a brave young man was standing, hoping to sell bouquets of white flowers.  He noticed a Bangla book I was carrying with me and called out.   “Bhaijaan” is what he said, tugging me somewhere in the heart.  In no time  I was out of the exit queue and he gave up on the idea of selling flowers to the demonstrably irate French.  We sat on a bench of the platform and chatted for about an hour, oblivious of the trains that came and went, and ignoring the edgy morning crowd of students, the chic literati, and the suave looking women that seem to populate this part of Paris. 

What we talked about had nothing to do with France, Europe, or the ambience of this crowd and this life.  We were talking of a faraway land; of silted rivers and verdant fields of mustard; of songs and poetry, dispossession and Diaspora.  Azim turned out to be a very sensitive soul; well informed, infected with a sadness and melancholy that only a self-exiled knows, and angry.  Angry with himself for leaving the job of a journalist in Chittagong, for traversing a complex route that took him to Cyprus, Bucharest, Vienna, and then sitting through the night along with stinking cattle, while the truck rolled into France.  I tried to lighten the burden of his soul, quipping light-heartedly how the English and the French once came to our shores without proper visas and stayed on for hundreds of years.  Although they came to trade they were soon ruling us, I quipped and maybe one day your children will populate this land; that would be an apt pay-back.  I told him about how the French and the English fought tooth and nail over India and our conversation digressed into Chandannagar, Sri Aurobindo, and Pondicherry.  And then to more recent and racy topics:  Taslima Nasreen, Begum Zia… the shenanigans of our land.

This is Bangali Diaspora;  the nostalgic conversation on Paris railway platform, Hasan Raza songs emanating from  $80 two-in-one cassette players in a Chicago suburb, the afternoon “adda” in a house smelling of asafoetida and garlic in Canberra; from Manila to Copenhagen, from Sydney to Seattle this is how an self-exiled inchoate identity is being fashioned into a potent force that is destined to influence Bangladesh in coming years. No one knows for sure what the number is because no one is counting but the number of Bangladeshis living overseas swells and swells and now spills into whole neighbourhoods, suburbs and even townships of certain cities of UK and US. 

I was recently talking to Sunil Gangapadhaya, who along with his wife Swati G. recently visited us in Canberra.  Sunilda had just been to New York for a book fair.  He thought the New York book air is soon going to be the second largest Bangla book fair in the world, second only to Dhaka and bigger than the Calcutta Book fair.  A popular writer in Bangla, he was ecstatic about this development and described his obvious excitement and pride when he saw people reading US styled tabloid-thick Bangla newspapers in the New York subway or when he dialled a wrong number in the Jackson Heights suburb in NY city, and got an error message in Bangla!    This chutzpah-filled Bangalization of the American urban landscape is not being engineered by the sleek literati of Calcutta, or for that matter by their cohorts in the upper echelons of Gulshan Baridhara enclaves, rather it is being gleefully done by young men from Sylhet and Barisal, Magura and Chapai Nababgong.  You can see the audacity and the pedgree in the sheer brashness of the action and the syntax and spelling of the bangla written in the public spaces and the newspapers.  It is an apt example of the global village-empire striking back, with the advantage of sheer number, unabashed enthusiasm for trade and business, and the rustic glee whose Sicilian and Irish variety once transformed the inner cities of Chicago and Boston.  This is how it ought to be; not by the whispered imitated consonants of the urban educated class, nor by the wanna-be genuflection of the pampered rich; the Bangali nation in Diaspora belongs to the “Mufassal” boys and girls and the reflects the truly indigenous energy of Bangladesh.

I salute this emerging, fledgling Bangali identity in Diaspora.  It is in the process of claiming its rightful place in this global village and the word Bangali will soon mean something much wider than what is now between Nilfamari and Cox’s Bazaar.  Like the Irish, the Italian and the Jew the wandering Bangali will be a truly global citizen; creative, resilient, post-modern, and ultimately a welcome gift of history to its ancient geographical land.

Abed Chaudhury writes from Canberra, Australia