When the Fires at My Feet Again When the Vultures Are
Great britain is my country. Conceived in semitropical climes, I was borne in my female parent'southward tummy beyond the skies to wriggle feet first, umbilical cord wrapped loosely around my neck like a muffler against the northern arctic, out into the world in an industrial Scottish town where the diabolical flares of oil refineries dotted the Mordor-similar horizon (I still love the dystopian industrial landscape of refineries and rigs). And Pakistan is my country, where I returned, cradled equally an babe, to my begetter'south land, where I was weaned on dhansak and rode my tricycle in the dusty garden with the Bengali boy who was my offset love and who left me with a lifelong affection for the lilting accents of Indian English. And India is my country. My male parent was built-in before the political fiction of a separate Land of the Pure was invented, that allegedly sanctified place where my impure, hybrid, one-half-caste cocky grew up. He was built-in in India, the brotherland, he was an Indian first – and we are all one people. And, as a Parsi, Iran is my land. You lot could probably trace my father's ancestors back in a wiggly line beyond the stretched-out diamond of the subcontinent to the Gujarati coast where a priest mixed sugar in milk to evidence our hosts our sweetness and then dorsum across the body of water, where my voyaging ancestors lost rail of a month in their confusion, back to Persia. And you can get back further still, to some subsaharan African country, before nations and ethnicities and darker melanin-stained skins, when we were a single small tribe, all as pinkish every bit chimps, when my greatgreatgreatgreatgreataunt Lucy walked hand in hand with her daughter across the floodplain, leaving twin tracks of footprints to forever marking their journey.
We used to believe the world was rich in pure, unpopulated silences and emptinesses: that the electron was a pea whizzing around a giant echoing barn and the universe a wasteland of vacant infinite, lightly peppered at vast intervals past stars. But now we know that the atom is smeared full with the mistiness of electron clouds; that our DNA is bristling with a million macros, working, working; that our bodies are a safari park where a trillion trillion tiny animals play and prey; that the very free energy that fuels united states of america is borrowed from symbionts nestled deep inside our cells; that infinite itself is bulgingly heavy with dark matter; that, as Emerge Potter puts information technology,at that place is no such thing as no, there'south merely yes. At that place is no purity. Everything is swarming, teeming, crowded, crammed, overrun.
If nosotros were pure, we would be a race of Borg-like clones, a giant ant heap, an army of fatherless virgin Athenae. But instead recombination, reshuffling, mixing, mingling, confusing of chromosomes, a game of genetic musical chairs is repeated at every meiosis. And this messy, random ceilidh, this cat's cradle of couple swapping, is what keeps the states healthy, it'southward why we are a sexual species, it'southward what keeps us feasible and live.
I feel that lately there has been such emphasis placed on the fictions of boundaries and dividing lines and articulate separations: yous white man here and black man there; you Indian here and Pakistani there; you Hindu here and Buddhist there. And the borders are militarised, policed, you cannot cross without your documents, without your proof of identity. And all is mapped out in castes and ethnicities and –stans, in sects and political groups. And to claim the identity you must conform to a standard, fit an expectation. In this egotistic world of modest differences, heretics are more hated than infidels.
And at present I live in a land whose culture is famous for its rootlessness, its homesickness. "At that place's no such thing every bit Argentines and foreigners," a friend said the other solar day. "We Argentines are foreigners." In the young nation, when tango adult, more than one-half of the city'south inhabitants were not native born. And the tango reflects that, a longing for a by already lost, a by that belonged not to the porteños themselves, simply to their parents and grandparents dorsum in southern Italy and Kingdom of spain and the Jewish ghettos of Russia, a past longed for but not recovered, dissolved into the melting pot of the metropolis, just still retaining its savour, like a spice adding its distinctive note to a stew. It'south a quadruple nostalgia, layers upon layers of loss: the tango singers chronicle the story of the immigrant child far from the old country, the babyhood past and gone, the innocent first beloved, similar my Bengali boy lost forever, and, as we listen to the singer, we evoke, with nostalgic melancholy, a gold age of tango, a golden historic period which was itself cornball, regretting its own lost idylls. And, returning full circumvolve, nosotros foreigners are exiles again, pilgrims to the misnamed silverless silver land at the bottom of the earth, to this young state of cows and oil, in one case ane of the world's richest and now in mourning for its more glorious past.
We are all mixed race, my friends. We are all messy hybridizations, misceginations, mongrelizations. We are all mutants, the products of random, promiscuous minglings. That is the nature of life. To purify is to sterilise, to impale. Our pasts, our heritages are never our own. They are always borrowed from others, from those who went before. We all accept hyphenated identities. And all countries, ethnicities, skin tones, races are fantasies, capricious boundaries, Partitions of the imagination. We are all mongrels, my friends. And mongrels, as every doglover knows, are the best dogs of all.
Source: https://fireandvultures.wordpress.com/2016/10/25/the-half-caste/
0 Response to "When the Fires at My Feet Again When the Vultures Are"
Post a Comment