Thirty Things

36, we're temporarily back

Hello dear readers,

Before three months ago, I’d publish at least one Twenty Things a month, to commemorate all the moments of joy that had accumulated through the weeks. It became a place where I could document feelings of excitement, amidst the chaos and temporality of my life and time here on Earth. It gave me a healthy reflection point, as sometimes I can be consumed with my own self-misery, but this column became a ritual, a way I was forced to engage with things beyond despair, and I have enjoyed cultivating this reminder in myself.

But, over these past few months, so many of us have been in limbo, that it’s been hard to feel good about anything. In all honesty, I’ve felt guilty in the moments when I have. Seeing genocide on my phone and then attempting to have a normal conversation still feels impossible but through months of deliberation, I also know it doesn’t mean I can’t have moments of resolve, or tenderness, or humor, or satiation from all the grief—and that is something that in liberation work we are required to imagine - a world where we can have the futures we all deserve.

My father is a Marxist Socialist but increasingly when we talk he’ll tell me of his hopelessness. It annoys the fuck out of me, because I find nihilism to be boring, so I remind him that it’s not revolutionary to think like that. Yet, the truth is, I also have never experienced what he’s experienced, surviving a literal genocide. Something his parents also survived less than three decades earlier.

I just recently found out about the Bengal famine, due to its similarities of what’s now happening in Gaza with a forced famine of over 2 million people. That’s not counting the people who have been injured, and who will die of preventable diseases and illnesses that are airborne or from bacteria from all the dead bodies. There are already reports of this that are coming out. 3 million Bengalis also died because of a preventable famine orchestrated by the British (aka the shitbag Churchill) in 1943, just four years before partition. I try to understand that I am a body that contains all this history and all this memory. Genocide is a collective experience. I think of all the children in Gaza who haven’t yet died who are witnessing this kind of mass death that is now a spectacle for us all to see but not stop. Sometimes it’s hard to find hope when this is the truth.

When my father finished his PhD from the University of Waterloo in Urban Planning, we moved back to Bangladesh because fuck the West. The irony is that we were only in Chittagong for 9 months, until we had to leave because of my dad’s political beliefs that were up against an increasingly Islamic fundamentalist perspective. He was a junior lecturer and professors and lecturers alike were being murdered for values that were deemed too left… and so we moved to Australia. But not out of choice. If my dad had had another way, he would never have left the land he fought to liberate. I think this, his life, my mother, our broken family, has made him lose hope in the world. I get mad at him for being this way but I have to humble myself, I believe in revolution because my life is still ahead of me, and there are so many things worth fighting for and dying for. But in a way, I hold that grief that many elders might have - of never fully having the lives they wanted because of war, genocide, mass migration, familial trauma, racism, class shit… or also all of the above!

Yet… I also keep thinking of the Sonia Sanchez quote in the Toni Morrison documentary that came out a few years ago: “If you don’t laugh; you don’t survive.” Sometimes, it’s as simple as that. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it does mean there’s value in things that bring us joy, ease and laughter - so that we may go on. I sincerely believe these things—as well as community—are a salve to the hardest pains we have to endure. So let us be by each other’s side when we go through them, let us find peace in ourselves as we continue to fight. This is not about disassociation, it’s about the profundity of both, and. We get to dictate what liberation and how looks. I’m frustrated that my dad can’t seem to understand the importance of dreaming… I also wonder if he’s stripped that part of him out to survive, to accept and surrender to life.

I admire that about him, his sheer will to survive, and I also know that maybe it’s my job, my role and responsibility, to dream for both of us. To believe in something more, for each other. On my best days, I can remember that.