dandelion gone wild

Recently I met a very young woman who fled her country and embarked on a journey that demands an enormous amount of courage. As I was aware that she might be in a fragile psychological state, I encouraged her to speak about anything she chose to and just tried to give her a sense of safe space. Despite her limitation to communicate in English, she well-articulately narrated bits and pieces of her struggles as well as the hope that keeps her going. One statement that she kept repeating with tears rolling down her cheeks “my religion, my culture, my society, my people refuse to accept me because I am different.”

I was given the option to evacuate- board the last flight out of Dhaka and stay in London until airports in Cyprus open. Stay or go?- I was torn. I faced a whirlwind of emotions, fears, and guilt. Some colleagues left and I stayed behind with others. I brace myself for whatever might happen next.

I told myself to remain calm.

I tried to limit myself to reading essential news only but that’s nearly impossible. My line of work – the humanitarian sector – requires me to remain updated, or even anticipate how a crisis like this may unfold and how the communities we work for may be impacted. So, I wake up to whatsapp messages piled up in several group conversations. I roll out of bed to make myself breakfast and get prepared for telework to support our team on the COVID-19 response. For last couple of days I am working on translation of forensic documents, specifically on dead body management. This is like a constant reminder that something horrible is round the corner.

Around 11am, I take a break to roll a cigarette sitting in my balcony and puff at it staring at the mango tree laden with fruits. I look for the two baby crows in their nests. I hear the sounds of crows and sparrows and observe the silence of the city. Then I suddenly hear a loud chatter and I lean forward to get a sight. I see a group of Hijras* at the entrance of a residential building. Normally, a vast majority of these fellow humans survive day to day as they battle with systematic stigmatisation. I recall the facebook post by a Hijra activist friend appealing for support on behalf of their community a few days ago.

Worries and sadness engulf me. Hundreds and thousands will soon be facing the moment of choosing between dying from hunger or suffering from the notorious virus. For most, probably this won’t even be a choice!

I return to my desk and resume my work. Till it’s time for lunch. Cooking started to become a task I look forward to. This is a positive development in my personal life as I have a complicated relationship with the kitchen.

Afternoon moves on with work, cigarette breaks, and text-exchanges.

At late afternoons, I usually schedule a catch-up with a friend in Cyprus or somewhere in this world. These conversations usually fill my soul with warmth which as a result help me remain sane during this unprecedented time.

As fork-up my dinner, I call my siblings- two are just a few kilometres away from my place in Dhaka and one lives in Kuala Lumpur. I realise our conversation, just like our lives, has been hijacked by this notorious virus. Our worries for each other’s wellbeing now replaced our planning for the upcoming weekend or our future travel together.

I go to bed thinking what’s happening in the world is just a dream – a nightmare that will be over when I wake up tomorrow morning. I will be able to board a plane home and soon be in my comfort zone surrounded by people I love in Cyprus. 

People board a plane probably silently chanting a prayer or wishing for a safe travel, I step in thinking how big fat privilege it is to be able to travel unrestricted and without headaches. Almost every time I enter a plane!

Not long ago that I obtained the privilege to travel that a very small portion of people in the world has (for most, it comes as a birthright). Since then I boarded probably over 60 planes to about 25 destinations... several places I have been to more than once. That's quite an intense amount of traveling to fit into a period of 20 months. I still didn't manage to quite process the privilege I now have. I still can't stop thinking how a piece of paper gave me unrestricted access to the world. It still astonishes me how I am treated as being a totally different individual by those controlling the human-made borders; how I can head to airports without worries and without prior approval to enter a country which costs time, money, resources and most importantly, one's peace of mind. Sometimes, the whole process to obtain a visa comes in the package of fear and sense of guilt that bends you down with submissiveness. The sense of dignity evaporates!

For these reasons, I often find very difficult to accept when people take the ability to travel for granted. Since I moved to London, my radar seems to frequently track talks about traveling to 'adventurous' and 'non-adventurous' parts of the world... by people who are garnished with the privilege to travel by birth and their passport gives access to most countries without troubles and their economic status lets them afford it. I feel that many fail to take into account how the majority of world's population don't have or have very limited access to the world beyond their own countries. Majority of these countries were colonized not very long ago and are still struggling to recover... or invaded one way or another by the almighty west.

Anyway, nothing is wrong with using one's privilege to travel.... getting connected to the world and people beyond border is incredibly beautiful. But I just wish more people do it sensibly, responsibly, and be compassionate to those fellow humans whose wings are clipped because their only crime was: they were born in a different country.

Today the world observes the International Day dedicated to the promise of the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Half-a-century on since the declaration of this day, some lives are still considered being less valuable than others. Some skin colours, races, ethnicities, gender identities continue to be considered as inferior than others. We live in a world intensely crisscrossed with human-made borders and some people are made to feel aliens. Some people are made to feel guilty just for being who they are or were born as. Some among us still have to battle for survival each and every moment. Some are forced to leave behind everything they are familiar with in the face of violence and turn their back to a land they call ‘home’. Some take immense courage to flee with the hope to find a safe haven. Such escapes are often topped with nightmarish experiences of being abruptly uprooted from their ‘home’ in the midst of warfare/ violence and accompanied by a perilous journey. Many of these fellow humans are received with hostility, seen as undesired and labelled as potential threats in the host societies. They are stripped-off the right to have rights. Humans become spectres. Alongside their very existence, spectre is their stories, their experiences, the tragedies they survived, the bloodshed they witnessed as well as their iron-will to flee, courage to face the horrendous barriers and strength to survive. 

Sometimes I truly wonder when will come the day: when our humanity will transcend every border drawn to sectorise the globe and to divide human race into races; when our hearts will bleed for each and every human tragedy and we will spread our arms to shield every fellow human in need on equal term; when race, ethnicity, descent, skin colour, religion or non-religion, sexual orientation or gender identity will no longer be used as a weapon against each other.

It’s probably high-time to stop promising and do more to stand up for someone’s right from wherever we are and in whatever we do in order to eliminate discrimination. To do this, we don’t need to master rocket science... it can be that we just need to check our privileges and be compassionate to those who are deprived.  

We live in a world heavily crisscrossed with human-made borders and we are assigned certain identities tied to some lands fenced up with imaginary borders. The existence of ‘nationality’ is undeniable in our lives – we like it or not. I generally feel uncomfortable about the concept of nationality for various reasons including the fact that it is exclusively political. That’s why, I avoid associating myself with any particular national identity.

But... on a personal level, while ‘nationality’ means nothing, ‘home’ means a lot to me! A lot!

The piece of paper that officially confirmed that I have been ‘naturalised’ into a Cypriot is very precious to me! Because it recognises and secures my bonding with the place I call ‘home’. It has been a huge relief because it ended my existence as a spectre in socioeconomic sphere of this society. It granted me full access to my political rights that as an active citizen of this world I so wished to exercise. This paper ends my frustration, the darkness I was embalmed with, the harsh lashes of injustice I felt every time I had to lose an opportunity to grow professionally and expand my capacity to do more for the society I feel I belong to. This paper ended the longstanding worries of my friends for my safety and their fear of having to see me leave. This paper means that I no longer need to customise my answer to the query of immigration officers at borders and feel compelled to say what they would like to hear and keep myself trouble-free. I can legitimately say now ‘I live here’ which is precisely what I do for so long. This is something I badly wanted to shout back each and every time I was asked by a border official ‘what do you do in Cyprus?’. I will not be considered as an ‘extraterrestrial’ just because my papers say so!

Most importantly, this piece of paper interprets as my security which ensures that I will never have to leave behind the place where I have been embraced with so much love, where I feel to have grown up and where I am surrounded by friends who are more than the word ‘family’ can describe.

I am a Cypriot because I chose and feel to be part of this community. I am a Bangladeshi by birth. I am ethnically a Bangali because my biological ancestors were so. I speak English, Greek-Cypriot and Bangla. I think in a linguistic hodgepodge of English and Greek-Cypriot and mouthfully swear in Greek-Cypriot. I sing in Bangla and I recall my childhood memories in Bangla. I take pride in none of these elements of my identity individually. What I am proud of is the fusion of all these identity elements that I have. I am even more proud of the fact that I managed to build a home in a land where I found myself accidentally at my 16, be loved by people with whom I have no biological and racial tie and be able to break through the border politics of this world which tells us to tie our sense of home and belonging to the land where we were born or our biological ancestors lived.

My younger sister never called me ‘mom’, but for the last few years she never misses to wish me on Mother’s Day and shares this photo dedicating to me. Her wishing is a throwback of a struggle she fought back 7 years ago - a struggle that she would have been spared from if she were a man. Because keeping the family’s honour intact would not have been shouldered to her. Shame would not have been a paralysing fear for the family when she refused to be trafficked into a marriage. I was only an ally to her persistence against all the odds and her resistance, but apparently she finds traces of motherhood in my support to her.

I half-jokingly call a close friend of mine ‘mother’ because of her care and affection for me, which is comparable to my definition of ‘mother’. I can’t help but feel ‘motherly’ love in some of my close friends in the way they care for me. I got to see wonderful women who mother their children (biological or adopted) in the face of all adversity life threw at them. And there are great mothers who are not females and/ or didn't subscribe themselves as women.

Mothers are not just those who are biologically females and voluntarily or by force comply with the heteropatriarchal society’s demand to be reproductive and take up the role of mothering their offsprings. Mothers are not just those who are biologically and physically able to and choose to carry a child. Mothers are certainly not only those who can be fit into the boxes society supplies us with a label ‘mothers’ on it.

While all types of media are being flooded with posts and articles in the observation of International Women’s Day 2016; mostly portraying success/ positive stories of achievements, the shamelessly brutal face of our humanity was also made its way to our platter of news.  

I am talking about Jonia. The 15 year old female domestic worker who was pushed off the roof of an 11-storey building in Dhaka on last Sunday - just a night before we drenched ourselves in celebratory mood of the International Day dedicated to women. Prior to this cruel act, Jonia was allegedly raped, a violence that is widely triggered at girls and women due to their gender and a notorious production of heteropatriarchy.

‘Heartbreaking!’ will be a lazy reaction to a news of such a heinous act. We should probably be ashamed – ashamed of not being able to put an end to these violent acts occurring again and again. Ashamed of letting ourselves still co-exist shoulder to shoulder with these atrocities against girls/ women.  Ashamed that we leave in an era where we firmly believe in ‘education for all’, yet the child domestic worker in our households’ or neighbours remain invisible to us. Justice failed to protect these children; many of whom are female. Jonia’s case is probably just one another thunderbolt from the widespread cruelties that the least privileged girls and women in our society are subjected to.

Gazing at the photo of Jonia’s grieving mother while my brain is freshly loaded with messages of International Women’s Day shared in social media, I could hear myself asking if this woman on my computer screen was ever told that she and her daughter are full humans – as full as a man is. Wondered if she ever heard of this day we, the literate and privileged women, celebrate as the remembrance of our collective achievements for over a century now. If she did happen to hear about it from a sensible source, wondered if she were able to believe in its existence, sense unity with the women from upgraded social class and could consider it as a pride, a day to celebrate and perceive as an inspiration to fight for her rights in her everyday life. Or her reality left no space to believe in such a thing or her daily struggle for mere survival totally consumed her?

This “be like bill” fever in social media reminded me of my mom’s constant preaching “be like Shoma” during my childhood when she sensed that I was not performing as her desired character of a daughter.

Shoma and I were classmates and our families were neighbours almost since our births. Very close neighbours who shared a common wall between our houses. Almost like twin houses with massive amount of intimacy shared between our families. For my mother, Shoma was an icon owning an ideal set of feminine characteristics. She often told me, “be like Shoma.  Can’t you learn from her to be reserved?”. In her dictionary, ‘reserved’ meant being passive, quiet, shy, low-voiced and certainly, obedient. Each and everything that I was not. No matter how much I tried to well-seal my disobedience and my ‘unreservedness’ fearing the lashes that might land on my back, my extrovert traits betrayed me quite often. So, I had to hear my mother preaching bitterly and often get caught in the hands of her husband (my biological father) so as I could be ‘straightened up’.

But, I simply could not be like Shoma! I can never be. After my brain were endorsed with some knowledge on human psychology and my mind was exposed to understanding diversity in human personalities, I realized Shoma was a highly introvert character – just the extreme opposite of mine. My voice was not built to be low-toned. My mind failed to restrain my thoughts and feelings from being spit-off to the extent I was desired to do. It was simply impossible to hold back my loud laughters, when no adult watchdog could be located in my radar. I simply could not be a girl with all the characteristics of a female determined by the Bangladeshi patriarchal society which flourished under the conservative Islamic teachings.  

Women are meant to tame their traits and to give up who they are and how they feel to be. Freedom is just another word for bitching. A woman who seeks to shackle herself free was nominated as a bitch. Or a slut, who is said to have set her vagina free to unlimited subscription of penises - with or without a fee.

Hundreds of thousands of women give up. They align themselves with those desirable introvert characteristics forcefully. If I did the same, I so know now that I would have ended up being a very unhappy human. I would have been choked by the forces of suppression.

Once a friend asked if I would give up cycling if I had a car to commute. My response was a bold NO. I was 24 when I rode and fell off my recently-bought bmx bicycle while attempting to tame it. It took me another couple of years until I dared to get on a regular city bicycle and be on road.

Being stamped a girl, when I was instructed to sit leaving no gap between my thighs and walk delicately ('no stamping!', an authoritative voice would shout), expecting to learn how to cycle was beyond imagination. My mouth won’t even dare to spit off words of such ‘bitchy’ desire! I recall the very first time I saw a woman riding bicycle during my trip to India in 2002, I was astonished. Puzzled as the same time. My 16-year-old mind couldn’t figure out how a non-Bollywood female figure in Indian countryside was allowed to roam around on a bicycle!

So, now the very fact that I stretch my legs to ride on a bicycle and control my destination while breathing in open air has been a huge pride for me. It’s my pride of confronting the rules society injected me as soon as I was born a girl in a deeply patriarchal society where a zillion pairs of eyes are ready at any moment to execute their judgements upon a creature with a vagina. It’s my pride of being disobedient to those rules and norms. It’s a pride of putting together the crumbled pieces of self and be able to sing disregarding all the whispers. Despite zillion curses being tattooed on my body that I can hardly ignore their existence, I learn to take a pride on them for walking me to the distance. Religion still attempts to veil my naked freedom and threaten the affection of my biological union I wish to safeguard, yet, I learn to defend being who I choose to be. I reclaimed my body; it’s no longer someone’s honour. I am not born to serve anyone’s desire – but only mine. My heaven is built by my own hands – it’s laid under the feet of no man or authority.

Last July (2015), while I was walking pass one of the main streets of Nicosia, I bumped onto this march of black-attired men (my eyes couldn’t trace any women) between late teen to early 30s. I stopped to observe them as they marched past me. As I could hear ‘Cyprus is Greek’, I could imagine this slogan with an extension: “Cyprus is Greek-Christian-Orthodox-Heterosexual-Patriarchal”. 

The concept ‘islamophobia’ should be renamed as ‘muslim-o-phobia’; just like race-ist, sex-ist etc.. The phobia people have is not often for Islam which is an ideology that someone may very logically like to adopt, or decide to reject, or be skeptical about, or be afraid of. Sadly, people are afraid of people – the muslim, the followers of Islam. To me, it makes more sense if we call the irrational fear or phobia of this particular group of our fellow humans predominately seen in the global west ‘muslimophobia’.

A friend wondered whether it is politically correct to be religiophobic?

2015 treated me well and made me grow in many ways! Embarked on it while being in Bangladesh after 12 years, and while re-visiting and re-discovering the Bangladeshi bit of my identity. This time I explored it on my very own terms; unlike just consume what I was being spoon-fed by my super conservative biological clan until my 16. Second half of 2015 stepped in accompanied by my long-desired degree in social work and coupled up with a social contribution award. Then, my new academic mission with a wonderful bunch of gender scholars took off. The ripple of refugee crisis that we experienced in Cyprus brought in new challenges at work and working with survivors of some of the worst cruelties in humankind continued enhancing me a big time. Times, attempting to put my heart and soul both at work and studies much I desired, felt overwhelming, but being in this motion is both a choice and a privilege. Can’t complain an inch! Now dear 2016, I wish you to be as good; I expect you to stretch up my horizon and be little more empowering  so as my ovaries dare to do more and put a much-needed end to a longstanding saga.

I was sexually abused several times during my childhood, from my age as young as 5/6 year old. Little did I understand what exactly I was facing, but I knew it was something prohibited and I was not supposed to talk about. The taboo around sex and everything that had to do with female genitalia is so intensely embodied in the society that the girls learn quite early that they would be blamed and shamed if they speak about their experiences that involved their genitalia.

Only about one incident, I happened to speak out. That was in 1998, when I was only 12 year old. I was being sexually abused by my music tutor repeatedly. He was rubbing my upper thighs while I was playing harmonium. I was quite defenceless since my hands were occupied to play the harmonium. I reacted immediately when he touched my breast in one occasion. I stood up and ran. I shared this incident with our domestic worker who seemed to have ears of compassion. She relayed my narrative to my mother who, then, shared it with my father. After hearing about the incident, he ruled that I was just trying to get rid of a good tutor by fabricating such a story. He compelled me to resume my lessons with this tutor. Being quite distressed by what happened and determined to put an end to this abuse, I faced the tutor when I had my next lesson with him. I told him that I would ask his daughter [who used to be my classmate] if he had done the same thing to her. I also told him that if she said ‘yes’, I would let him continue doing what he had done. He begged me not to speak to her about this. From that day, he never stepped in our house again.

I still wonder if my parents even put themselves in the process to think why this music tutor disappeared all of a sudden and never bothered to say a thing before he quitted his job.

For last 2 days, my thoughts are with beautiful Paris, who I first met few years ago, fall in love with and still cherish our memories together.

… but I can’t overlook the fact that atrocity, in its due course, is crawling into our part of the world and teething-out to bite us. Today is Paris, but yesterday was Beirut and the days before came with countless news of bloodsheds in Syria and violence in other parts of the world. If we still think that this type of atrocity is isolated in distant-lands, we are so wrong! It’s probably high time to shuffle our thoughts. If we still can’t feel the terror and trauma our fellow humans from other parts of our planet face and empathize with the desperate souls who bet their lives at the hand of rough sea in rickety boats as the only option to survive bloodshed, then probably we are nothing but disgrace to our human-hood and humanity.

“Pray for Paris” and its parody versions are going viral. I don’t want to pray… for anyone or anything! Pray for what? What kind of miracle our prayers will do when we set our hands in idle and became just observers? No supernatural figure up in the sky can save us if we don’t come out from our idleness and save ourselves. I'm unsubscribing from all sorts of prayers. Praying for something will do nothing if we don’t fight against atrocity happening in any corner of the world. Praying just drags us to hallucination and turn us idle.

I am mourning, but I don’t want to paint my profile with French national flag or with any other hardcore nationalist symbols. My bleeding heart can express its solidarity with the victims of this brutal crime in other ways that is more humane, more intimate and more sensible. I do not want to go under the umbrella of a national symbol that is profoundly used to narrow down which-basket-we-belong-to and which basket-we-don’t-have-the-right-to-belong-to. I don’t want to validate or reinforce any sort of nationalist sentiments. To exhibit my solidarity to victims of a disaster, I would have preferred something which makes me feel connected with humans than with a nationality.  Pain and grief have no border, no nationality, no ethnicity.

During my errand in old Nicosia on one afternoon last summer, I bumped into a friend who introduced me to a young woman accompanying him – a British visual artist exhibiting her work in Cyprus. After a brief casual chit-chat with them, when I was about to say them good-bye, my friend told us, “you two have the same ancestral ties!”.

It was first time in last 13 years, I felt an instant connection with a young woman with Bangladeshi background. I met her with a cigarette in her hand, a beer glass half-full in front of her and she is topped with an outfit (mini with a tank-top) that is comfortable for a sweaty summer afternoon. I encountered only a handful number of Bangladeshi women in this island and almost everyone I met came in pair with their married spouses. Afraid of being (or feeling like being) judged by them for not being the Bangladeshi-looking-obedient-woman, I tried not to cross my path with them or expose myself beyond the necessity that I was required by my job. 

So, with Diana – her name, over drinking our local beer and puffing our hand-rolled cigarettes, we found ourselves complementing each other in narrating our girlhood experiences of being raised in conservative Bangladeshi societal context – let that be geographically located in Bangladesh like I did, or in well-preserved Bangladeshi community in Manchester where she was born and grew up. Our spark reached its climax when we started talking about our experiences of revisiting Bangladesh…. and marriage. Oh marriage, how predictable! Traditions backed by patriarchy and validated by religion can strangle a marriage-aged unmarried woman, when you refuse to submit to it. You pay high for your rebellion. And what you pay and what you endure, it may either inspire you to grow out of the box or drag you towards a dark-hole. 

Thanks to social media and a wide range of friends and acquaintances in conjunction with my increasing curiosity to explore Bangladesh through my strolls in virtual sphere, I happened to notice a group of Bangladeshis who seems like living in a bubble – a bubble that well-preserve the ‘fantasy-land’ they live in. The life they perform do not feel like staged in the Bangladesh I know, I lived and most importantly, it does not fit into the portrait of Bangladesh that the mass media projects!

I caught myself being interested in trying to figure-out the puzzle of the highly contrasted ways of life between the elites of Bangladesh and the average citizens. And measure the distant in between these two groups. It feels like the elites have built a well-secure shield which protects them from all sorts of negative social sanctions, and the tinted glass of their cars seems to block the view of harsh reality lived by average citizens for their daily survival. It seems like these elites do not breathe the polluted air of Dhaka; their nostrils are not filled with black segments from air pollution when they step out of their house. The cries of hundreds of thousands of fellow Bangladeshis tormented by widespread violence and grilled by poverty cannot beat the elites’ eardrums or make their hearts ache. All these miseries, all these agonies, cries, shouts cannot simply penetrate the walls of the bubble they live in. The elites seem to be quite preoccupied by the nouveau riche syndrome they are suffering from and are too busy competing with their peers in the exhibition of wealth.

What is even more interesting is that the social norms applied in the lives of these elites look very different from those of average citizens. Even the merciless rules that shackle one ruthlessly seem quite relaxed for these elites. Everything we knew about Bangladeshi society and every social barrier an average citizen faces, and every taboo one lives through, feel almost non-existent in this elite portion of the Bangladeshi society. I am fascinated by how one’s wealth can facilitate such a ‘liberal’ living and let one purchase privileges that deactivate the austere social sanctions. Even the strict religious rules that imposed on most people’s lives, are somewhat compromised for the elites.

It will be quite interesting to dig out how this Bangladeshi elite community built such a well-protected life where they can do whatever they wish to. They can trade anything they fancies and can live without the negative experiences the general public face in their everyday living. How well-sealed their social environment is that nothing penetrates through and the harsh reality does not dare to slap on their faces? Do they have to negotiate with the broader social rules at all? Why their way of submission to Islam (interestingly, most of the elites appeared to be muslim and they publicly exhibit their obedience to Allah) is much different than that of others? The acts that could be swiftly labeled as un-islamic by the wider Bangladeshi society is acceptable or at least tolerable when it comes to elites.