NOT ANOTHER DIASPORA PIECE
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: the song of Bengal slicing through the twilight silence like a magpie robin’s wing. Ami tomake bhalobashi... Even when the sky is devoured by darkness. Even when your tongue is a maimed, fleshy muscle that shapes foreign words. Death is a defunct language we half-remember the words to. Our grandparents can still sing it from memory. The way I carry myself is so Bangladeshi – desire personified, desperate to own the space I demand for. But the way that I talk is British through and through – syllables slaughtered before they can even leave my mouth, clawing onto what I can never call mine.
I grew up with barbed wire and Bollywood ballads. Onscreen, I am Pakistani, a tight-lipped Muslimah peeking coyly through her veil or a disgraceful daughter who falls in love with the wrong man only to convert for him. At school, I am Indian, and they can’t even point to my country on a map when I correct them. It feels like I don’t exist anywhere else. Constantly swallowing down paroxysms, I opt to sing along with Parvati as she croons for a lover who could never marry her. Hamesha tumko chaha... Devdas cannot accept her into his family because she is of a lower class, but he strikes her across the face on her wedding day to some other so that she will always be marked by his love. Strikes, marks, borders, partitions, they’re all the same: wanting to own something to the point of violence. This is how Bengali women are taughtto love, eternity smeared out like sizzling palm oil on a pan that spits it back hotly into our faces. When I tell someone I love them, should it be in English or in Bangla? Not everything can be said, so I just kiss anyone who holds me close instead.
Every single tragic Shakespearean female character I’ve encountered reminds me of every single brown woman I know. That’s where my obsession with the Bard of Britain stems from – a fractured reflection through the fretwork that makes up us. Juliet would rather die than comply with an arranged marriage; Ophelia is obedient until it drives her to insanity; Cordelia finally earns her father’s goodwill by dying in the process; Lavinia is mutilated and butchered by male desire– and I am here, split in half. Decay thrums like a second heart in my chest and when I try to speak, it clamours over me. The first time I saw an item song on TV, I was unable to tear away my gaze from everything we were supposed to be. Glistening bodies, undulating hips, fluid rhythm... Light-skinned, thin, beautiful... Who’s the hottest girl in the world? My Desi girl, my Desi girl... I am prone to having these episodes, where I could be smiling with anyone and then the scene cuts, the movie screen bursts into technicolour, and a role descends upon me like the changing of the guard. Body double. I try to wrench myself away but I can hear the orchestra even in the quiet, grandiose and glorious.
During my childhood, I was fed on a steady diet of clinking bangles, dupatta catching on sleeves, swelling symphonies, sparring gazes, and the cinematic swoop in his arms at the climax of every Bollywood romance. Make some noise for the Desi boys! The first time I witnessed a brown man telling a brown woman that white women were better than us, I thought of all the times I defended brown men from the whole world– because who else would? Blood flooded my mouth and I had to turn away. The thing about diaspora is that no one knows what it means beyond the cracks that spread outwards like tremors in the earth. Follow the damage until you find the source: a fork in the road, a split in the soul, something marred by the despotism of trying to fit into a form that was never yours. You fail both ways and both ways fail you, so who is the winner after all? I am starting to understand why Bollywood does romantic tragedies so well. Something is breaking– breaking out like a sickness, and I can identify it by the smell of rot that follows me around these days.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: I’m sick of your language but I’m in love with it too. How do you cup a writhing bird between your hands and crush it until it goes limp in a singular English word? I hate your spelling tests, I want to scream. How do you fan out its wings and trace the seams of its veins with a knife, puncture flesh and dissect reason, in Bangla? I hate your grammar, your syntax, your clauses, your vernacular. So many creative writing competitions won in Englishand I still think of all the Bangla I shoved to the back of my wardrobe, too unadorned and too unrefined to wield literarily now. I can speak it but I cannot write in it, and that’s the same as not being able to breathe in it. But can I breathe in these lines instead? Screams can be transmitted through script, but they are lost in transit from land to land, from brain to mouth, from hand to page. You can try to pin down a bird to watch its wings spasm, but eventually it stops moving because it is too weak to handle your strain. Language is killing a beautiful thing and knowing it will never be enough.
I want Sanjay Leela Bhansali to direct my funeral. I want the chiaroscuro of the vibrant colours and the striking darkness settling over my eyes in a feverish film. I want the flamboyant swoosh of clothes and the iridescent scenic stills. I want Tagore reciting poetry and Phoebe Waller-Bridge to play the roles of all the funeral-goers. I want Zayn Malik performing in Urdu and I want Boygenius to fuck me. I want everything to stretch out endlessly, suspended like specks of light in the air. And then, my heart will surge with adoration; and then, my heart will sing with no translation; and then, my heart will become a river rushing to the sea until it finds completion.
Translations:
“Ami tomake bhalobashi” – “I love you” in Bangla
“Hamesha tumko chaha” – “I have always loved you” in Hindi
Farabee Pushpita, 22, Oxford - England ✯ IG: @aureate_angels
“My name is Farabee Pushpita (she/they) and I’m a 22 year-old English student at Oxford. I write both fiction and poetry; my work has been published in a number of student literary magazines and newspapers, but I have not officially published any body of work as of yet. Pertinent to my work are thematic explorations of (British Bangladeshi) diaspora, the intersection of race and gender, mental illness and intergenerational family trauma.”