|
Lover of leaving
Writer-photographer Abeer Hoque whose debut exhibition opens at Dhaka’s Drik Gallery this week, tells Isobel Shirlaw why she gave up her studies at one of the top business schools in the US and decided she will never take
a permanent job ever again
photo by Abeer Hoque
|
Abeer Hoque is showing me some of her stories. Beautifully handwritten on huge sheets of blue paper, they tell tales of ordinary people’s lives – of maids, young lovers or of marital strife. They form part of a greater work, entitled The Lovers and The Leavers – a photographic-literary exhibition that opens tomorrow at the Drik Gallery in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi.
Born in Nigeria to Bangladeshi parents, Abeer moved to the United States when she was 13. ‘I went to high school in a suburb of Pittsburgh and although all American high schools are terrible’, she recalls, wincing; ‘my experience was particularly awful. My sister and I were the only non-white kids in the school and because we’d come straight from Nigeria, the others made fun of everything we did.’
‘We had heavy African-British accents which everyone ridiculed. I have always been good at accents so I immediately dropped mine and adopted an American one instead. We had no television in Nigeria so we didn’t have a clue about pop culture – the cool shows or songs and we wore the wrong clothes. The one thing I was proud of – the fact that I got good grades, obviously just made me even less cool in their eyes.’
It is hard to believe that the girl she is describing is in any way connected to the person sitting opposite me in the bedroom of her aunt’s peaceful, airy house overlooking Dhaka’s Gulshan lake. Confident, attractive, and sparky, Abeer exudes an overwhelming aura of self-belief. The only indication of her ‘shy, awkward and serious’ former self is the way in which she pauses, with slight reservation, before she replies to my questions with the introspective, eloquent responses characteristic of those who rarely stop thinking.
‘I only really came out of myself when I got to college. At university people are there to learn; they’re interested in other people – where you come from – what makes you different’. I was studying Business at the University of Pennsylvania and I went on to stay there for eight years, nearly completing a PhD before I realised that I wasn’t remotely interested in Business.’
‘In my college room I had a wall covered in paper on which I would write things that interested me. When I finally decided, in my late twenties, to devote my life to writing, people said that it had been obvious to everyone except me.’
Her parents were supportive when she told them. It was a difficult and unconventional path to take; ‘you rarely see first or second generation immigrants in the Arts’, she points out. ‘They are normally pressured into the more traditionally lucrative professions, such as economics, but luckily for me, literature is seen as a noble profession in Bangladesh and, possibly also because my parents both write, they were happy for me to make the step. My father immediately bought me a subscription to the New Yorker magazine.’
In the summer of 2005, after completing a Masters in creative writing in San Francisco, she decided to drop everything and go abroad. She gave up her flat and bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok.
‘I decided that I would never work more than part-time again so I would always have time for my writing, and I got an editing job which I could do from my laptop anywhere in the world.’
She was granted a Fulbright scholarship (a highly acclaimed US-government cultural sponsorship) in order to travel to Bangladesh and India and produce a combined photographic and writing project.
Her father had also been a Fulbright scholar which gives the story a certain poetic symmetry; he had moved from Bangladesh to the States to study at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University and he was one of the first South Asian students to get on the scheme.
‘When I arrived in Dhaka last November, it was during the hartal. I couldn’t really go anywhere so I spent most of my time at home, just chatting – to Baby, my aunt’s maid,’ to whom she has grown very close, and to the drivers and shopkeepers in the area. The stories are based on her interactions with the people whose lives her own has intercepted.
‘When I started to explore the place, I felt as if I had landed on a different planet; I felt so out of my skin, so foreign. When I had first mentioned moving to Bangladesh to my father, he was thrilled because he felt that I had roots there. But I didn’t feel that way at all. In some ways I feel American and in some ways I don’t. Likewise, sometimes I feel Bangladeshi; it depends on whom I am talking to’, she observes.
‘Now I am here, I feel like I am from here, even though the people I speak to hardly believe me.’
But how truthful is it anyway, to base our identity entirely on the place in which we have grown up, or spent the most time? Can any of us really say that we are from just one place, or are we the product of all the places we have seen – the people we have known?
Abeer sees identity, interestingly, in terms of individual people’s spaces – as something unattached to their physical environment – a personal, immaterial space that defies borders. ‘I have never felt totally at home in my space anyway, but you learn so much from stepping outside it.’
Perhaps because she doesn’t really have a marked concept of where she’s from, Abeer’s sense of who she is, is more sharply defined and independent of where she is at any time. In many ways it reflects the way in which she writes. ‘The stories of The Lovers and the Leavers echo the way we live our lives,’ she explains; ‘they are non-linear narratives – fragmented.’ Indeed, her as yet unpublished autobiography tells of a life in three parts; one third is set in Nigeria, a third in the States and the final section in Bangladesh. Although the physical space that we inhabit may change, there is a consistency to the self.
‘Despite the appalling lack of women’s rights, the consistent human rights abuses and the total absence of any form of dating scene, I feel comfortable here’, she says, smiling. ‘At first I was seriously disturbed by the way in which people were always staring at me but I went out one day with a British friend of mine and the level of intense harassment she received gave me a bit more perspective.’
‘I have a little camera perfect for taking candid street pictures but I usually wear a headscarf when I go out snapping, to hide my hair;’ Abeer has Mediterranean-looking dark curls. ‘My hair seems to be the biggest source of intrigue and the headscarf reduces the staring by about 90 per cent.’
‘Last year when I came to Bangladesh with my father I had bleached blonde hair and one day when I went out to a shopping mall with him, he asked me why I hadn’t worn my headscarf; by the level of staring, people obviously assumed I was crazy. I replied that it was because otherwise I would look religious, and I would always rather look crazy than religious.’
Her parents, who are still in Pittsburgh, are practising Muslims but Abeer is not religious at all; ‘they are probably praying for me right now – their wayward daughter,’ she laughs. ‘But they are liberal enough for me to say that,’ she clarifies, hurriedly.
I ask her if she feels that Bangladesh has changed since she was last here. ‘It’s less polluted than it was five years ago. Yes, it feels very different, but perhaps that is because I feel different now,’ she says, quickly, with that characteristic insight.
‘It has taken me a while to fit in here. I have friends but there seem to be so many cliques in Dhaka; there’s the expat gang and the rich Bangladeshi kids. There don’t seem to be that many people in between. And the rich people here are much richer than elsewhere; they’re absolutely loaded.’
‘I haven’t been outside Dhaka much. I spent a few days in my dad’s village in Feni, which is real rice paddy land. It feels like it is the middle of nowhere but so beautiful and quiet – the antithesis of city life. But I can’t understand the way they speak at all. It is Bangla but it is completely incomprehensible to me. And I was struck by the fact that all the women there wear burqas now. Six or seven years ago, when we visited, I don’t recall anyone wearing a burqa. My grandmother must be turning in her grave.’
Last autumn, Abeer started editing her grandmother’s memoirs and has become fascinated by the fiercely strong, revolutionary woman from Comilla who spent most of her life in Dhaka, campaigning for women’s rights to education. She wrote the book by hand, in English, in the late ‘90s, and she died five years ago. Someone typed it up and sent it to Abeer with a view to getting it published.
She clearly admires her grandmother enormously. ‘She chose to delay getting married, first because she wanted to go to university, and then because she wanted to work. And finally she married my grandfather, who allowed her to do what she liked, and they were both equal contributors to the family income. It was extraordinary in the context of their time’, Abeer reflects. ‘Her father lost his position as the leader of a mosque because his daughter went to school.’
‘I think the reason for the huge increase in the number of women wearing the burqa in Bangladesh today is partly due to rising fundamentalism, but also because so many Bangladeshis are going to work in the Middle East, it appears that some of the Middle Eastern mores are being imported.’
‘My ex-boyfriend lives in France, where there has been a constant debate in the news about the hijab. He was arguing that girls often wear it for reasons of social identity rather than religion. That may be so but I feel that it indicates a fundamental oppression of women. No-one or everyone should wear one. In the Quran there is no mention of women wearing the burqa. It simply states that both men and women should dress modestly.’
I ask her what kind of writer she is – whether she is disciplined and pedantic or spontaneous. ‘I am trying to be more rigorous,’ she explains, making a face. ‘I started off writing for just fifteen minutes every day, and I have now managed to get into a routine. I never write for longer than about four hours, though. I know they always say that you should just heave yourself out of bed in the morning, have a black coffee and a cigarette and get down to it, but I’ve always hated coffee, and mornings, and cigarettes, actually.’
She has not been writing for the past month though because she has been concentrating on organising the exhibition, which will close on April 10, her 34th birthday, so with artistic logic, she has decided to price each photograph at Tk 3,400.
Some of the photographs look more like paintings – abstract, colour-based pieces. One shows an extreme, defamiliarised close-up of two buses in deep indigos and turquoise. Although she loves to paint – mainly abstract watercolours, she claims they are completely lacking in artistic merit.
I particularly like the sound of one of the stories to be included in the exhibition, of an Indian boy growing up in Barcelona, who selects his girlfriends on the basis of how well they feed him – a fantasia of food, possibly linked to the fact that when she was living in Barcelona last year, she was so poor that she had to eat salad three times a day.
She gets up, excitedly, to show me some beautiful photograph-postcards which she has lovingly made, by hand, for the exhibition. ‘You know what?’ she says. ‘I was going to give these away for free, but they have taken me hours and hours and I have decided now that I am damn well going to make people pay for them. Only twenty taka, though,’ she adds, with an innocent smile.
 Top | Xtra
|
Also
|
