The Necessity Of Speaking
By Rakhshan Rizwan
03 September, 2013
Countercurrents.org
We have begun of late, to tune out what I call ‘the noise’, the slow but steady removal of the grinding, the guilt, the barely discernible cacophony of subliminal, sub-human voices.
My husband and I compete with each other over who reads the news less, who frequents Dawn.com less, who avoids the dregs of sordid news, the drudgery of by-elections, the litany of murders in the north-west, the bodies of Punjabi labourers riddled with bullets by Balochis, the heartbreak and horror of one oppressed class exercising its anger on another oppressed class.
We avoid news shows altogether. We quaver nervously when our relatives in Lahore inadvertently fill us in with the “latest.” Quickly, we change the topic to the weather, the food, the lunch, Eid, internal family politics, who had a baby- that sort of thing.We avoid having “political discussions” over Skype. “Koi aur baat kero, yaar” (“Talk about something else.”) We playfully steer the conversation away.
“When will you come to Pakistan, next?” We shamelessly leave the question unanswered. We entertain the questioner with our adventures in temporarily Sunny Europe, how our lonely Eids are spent, who does most of the cooking, How far we raced each other on our mountain bikes.
But an invisible tidal wave keeps pulling us back, to the origins of memory, to the smell of summer roses sold in Liberty bazaar, to the cool floors of our parents’ house, to the feeling of freshly mowed grass under our feet, to the political circus broadcast into our lounges every day, to the humid June months, to those countless memories of life that each of our senses have retained, loved, re-assembled, re-loved, over the course of our young lives.
Pakistan pops back into the conversation like an embarrassing relative. “Where are you from?”: the orientating question that doesn't allows one to venture very far. Reinforced, as it were, by regular humiliations at the immigration office. The trials and tribulations of a Pakistani ex-pat, who comes, by default, bearing diseases and poverty. So, the Doctor at the State Tuberculosis Clinic presses you against the radioactive rod to screen your lungs for anomalous pathogens. And the Accountant at the Bank screens your financial statements for anomalous dealings. The burden of that wretched (loved) green passport, which makes its way from the hand of one wretched immigration officer to another, before we are able to catch a wretched (loved) flight home. Where are you from? is always a wake-up call. When I fill in ‘Pakistan’ in official forms that request my ‘Place of Birth’ or ‘Country of Birth’ I feel that I am inscribing a lie on its clinical whiteness. It is where I was from, but not where I am, it is where all my dreams of life began, but not the place where those dreams culminate, yes it is the place where I was born minus that implication of rootedness, minus that suggestion of authentic belonging.
Some days, I feel that I belong everywhere. As comfortable being interrogated at Hamburg airport as I am opening my bags for customs at Amsterdam. As comfortable replying to uncomfortable questions about the unaccompanied nature of my travel at Karachi, as I am replying to patronizing questions pertaining to the ‘purpose of my stay’ at Frankfurt. But the truth is, that I am really not comfortable anywhere. How are the intrusive gazes of Pakistani men any different from the intrusive gazes of Europeans; each carving you out as ‘the other’, as outside the norm? Too Muslim for Europe, too female for Pakistan. But they are different, I know this too. The gazes of men on the streets of Lahore claimed you, against your will, as theirs, surveying your body with a sense of perverse entitlement. Whereas, the gazes here reject you altogether. You are not from us, they declare on the train, in the bus, you’re a ghost. You may be our neighbour, our friend but you will eternally belong to an imaginary elsewhere.
I am at the point where I don’t watch television at all and I do not miss it senselessly blaring in the background. I know there are fires in the city. I can sense it. I know a woman was assaulted in Sweden for the scarf on her head, I know people are now chucking petrol bombs in mosques, that a woman had her head slammed against a car for the colour of her skin, that they are passing legislation to ban halal meat, that they are institutionalizing Islamophobia, that the far-right is rising like a wave, that there are pictures of swastikas in the news, identifying new enemies but using the same old, beaten rhetoric. Golden Circle. Golden Dawn. National Party. English Defence League. The Anti-Immigration Party. Golden Haired Peoples' Party.Pan-European Blue-Eyed Male Party.
But as long as the golden haired boys aren't banging on my door…
As long as the Taliban are not weighing my Islam on their scale. As long as I am not a Hazara living in Quetta, As long as I am not Shia. As long as I am not the child whose family has met their end in a drone attack, in North Waziristan. As long as I am not the woman left to rebuild her life in Peshawar. I am fine.
I will continue to say ‘I am apolitical.’ I will continue to change the topic to more pleasant things like Dutch cheese or Dutch pottery or Dutch cows or Pakistani lawn, Pakistani samosas, Pakistani winters. I will continue my boycott of Pakistani news channels and media outlets and newspapers and e-newspapers and blogs. And. Facebook. and Twitter. It will get to a point where even a letter from an old friend will irritate me. That even the carefully packed chiffon suit that my mother mails me from Lahore will infuriate me. That even a well-meaning question about my annual sojourn to the city of my birth will send me into a vitriolic fit.
Because, I know that even poetry is not apolitical, nothing is. That, this carefully balanced world of controlled conversations and ritualistic avoidance is held in place by silence. And silence is political. It is where injustice festers, where genocide sows its poisonous seeds and where the laws of race, class, and ethnicity are laid out. We must all step into the whirling vortex of ‘noise’ and let it swallow us whole. We must speak.
Rakhshan Rizwan was born in Lahore, Pakistan and then moved to Germany where she studied Literature and New Media. She completed her M.A in British, American and Postcolonial Studies from the University of Münster and is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Comments are moderated