Lancaster and Chattogram, August 2024
There is a rumor going around—if one can still call it such once newspapers mention it: the new government will be led by a Nobel prize laureate. To anyone working in academia, however modestly, this is reassuring. Someone who knows hard work, patience, the untrustworthiness of shortcuts, and the value of discipline. Not as empty notions, but as bricks with which to build one’s path, competence, and comfort zone. Because despite all talk about having to transcend it, one is lucky to find it, a comfort zone.
Speaking of comfort, during the time of protests in Bangladesh, in the summer of 2024, I was at home, in Europe. To be more precise, I was making my new home in Lancaster, a small town in the UK, where my husband had just found a tenured position at the local university.
I heard that one of the two campuses of the university I work for, the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, had been closed for security reasons. All students had therefore been reduced to one campus and one dorm, eight students to one room. No air conditioning and nowhere to go for many of them if the country kept exploding.
The campus where I work, Mahsa Amini, is affectionately called ‘campus’ by the students and the people who work there, but it is just a building with some grounds around it, nothing restful, nothing graceful, nothing fancy. Dorms are hot, and there are cockroaches, which several of my students, waking up, have found entangled in their hair.
I am nervous about going back, I am sure not everyone is happy about the regime change and I could simply find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, I am a rich expat, someone working a very well-paid job in a country where young people, millions of them, must sweat blood to keep afloat.
It does not take a revolution, and this is one, to scare me: flights, crowds, confined spaces, animals, speed, failure… Oddly, I am not scared of solitude, not one bit, or my own death, not so much. I do fear a violent one for me, and an early and/or painful one for the ones I love.
When I started this fellowship, I decided I would keep myself as close as possible to my core. I would be myself without embellishments. I did, however, retain some truths from my students: all the privilege, and the possibilities to make something out of myself, many of which I have wasted, overlooked, and misunderstood. Second chances made all the difference for me, and I now regard them as my life’s true luxury. I knew I was going to work in a place where many of the students came from disadvantaged backgrounds, and I wanted them to trust me, so I edited some of the good luck out.
I discovered later that it was a good decision. The job is demanding and emotionally draining. Keeping up a façade, however authentic—not a contradiction in terms—would be difficult for anyone. I met other people who were, just like me, too busy to build a persona, or too tired to adhere to it, and this meant that some of us, those genuinely like-minded, connected strongly and unexpectedly.
During the protests, I was very worried about my friends and colleagues in Chittagong, who had to stay on campus during the Summer and had to remain confined within the premises of their apartments and dorms. For five days or so, they waited, without the possibility to communicate and let their families and everyone else know they were alright. During those days and nights, I held my breath, going through the motions and putting real thoughts on hold.
Young women at my university come from sixteen different countries and very different social classes. Some of them enjoy the support and closeness of their families, some others flew from impossible situations or were born and raised in refugee camps.
I have students who pile up small successes, scholarships, and internships like squirrels piling up nuts, students who get admitted to prestigious programs, but do not have the resources to go, and students who cannot even borrow a book without showing despair. Lia—not her real name—buries the books she borrows deep down in her backpack, maybe knowing she will not be able to return them.
While I teach them, I think that there must be so many ways in which what I say is received by them, trajectories intersecting and languages crackling. During the protests, a message, in the form of an e-mail, found its way to me. One of my students, Aysha—her real name—wrote: I am currently in Japan. The last few days have been some of the worst days we have seen in our entire lives. I couldn’t contact my family for 6 days. Please keep every Bangladeshi in your prayers. I realized keeping my breath and choking my thoughts was the closest I could get to praying.
Meanwhile, as I was refraining from breathing to the advantage of no one, my students faced their fear more constructively. Although they were forbidden from taking part in the protests, they organized help and support for the protesters. They also took up brushes and painted graffiti around the premises of the university buildings: the usual flags, which look like a green forest with a wound in the middle, optimistic flowers, and birds flying in a blood-red sky.
I have now bought my return flight to Chittagong. The interim government led by Mr. Mohamad Yunus seems to be enjoying a large consensus; the atmosphere is peaceful enough, I am told. I will concentrate on work; I want to end my fellowship well. Probably I will be more restricted than usual from going around, which means I can concentrate on lessons, work, and job applications. I do not have a job lined up after this, and it takes time to find it.
I also want to go back because I have left situations pending: a student I know, a professional artist, is working on a painting I want to give to my husband. I want to see it and take it to him. It portrays a bird on a wire, an image at the center of a well-known song by Leonard Cohen. When I ‘commissioned’ the painting to her, she came up with a better idea.
“Didn’t you say this is to be an anniversary present?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I will paint two birds then, on a wire.”
I asked her in the first place because I had seen another one of her paintings: two girls resting in a field, probably in love with one another. There is quiet intimacy traveling from one girl to the other, and it conveys the silence of the countryside. The same silent closeness ties the two birds together as well. Her only recommendation, when she finished it, was to find a vintage frame for it, as she couldn’t stand minimalist frames.
Some students can paint; others can write. Some of them have managed to infuse the written English they are learning—a trying work in progress—with personal experience and genuine thought. Zulaikha—her real name—one of my students from Afghanistan, expresses her thoughts delicately. In an essay about a short story by Amy Tan, she wrote:
In the game of chess, a single piece lost does not mean total loss; rather, it presents a chance for improvement and flexibility. In a similar vein, disappointments and setbacks can serve as transforming experiences that drive us toward achievement. This idea implies that sometimes it is a good idea to fail to put more effort into our future. Our wisdom is a welcome perspective in a society that demonizes failure and exalts success. It demonstrates that failure—represented by missing pieces—is not always bad but rather a necessary step on the path to achievement, and we learn from those missing pieces.
When I returned to Chittagong, the long drive from the airport to Masha Amini campus took place along continuous graffiti, a long washi tape of images of what had happened during July and August. August had not even ended yet, and its events had been immortalized for everyone coming to the country. Some of the images were festive and hopeful: we will rebuild our country, they said.
Some others were grisly images of young students being massacred. Someone painted Abu Sayed, the young man from Begum Rokeya University who stretched his arms out in front of the police, in a gesture of defiance or surrender—which of the two should not have made a difference—before the police shoot him dead.
I don’t know, Zulaikha. I will not say this to you because you are too young—and you have been through enough—to give up the notion of a telos, but it seems to me, more and more, that a loss is just a loss, a wound in the middle of hope. Sayed came from a poor family, the first of eight children to be admitted to university. His very old father said they were all hoping that Sayed would change the fate of the family after joining the government service.
It is obvious why he joined the protests.
