Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash
I travelled back to the UK this week for the launch of my father’s biography. That, in of itself is a rather momentous moment. But the whiplash of shifting a recent trip to Spain, back to Belgium, to the UK then a Bangladeshi community event was particularly intense.
I don’t feel such sequence of events is particularly rare in my life. If anything, I feel the sense of being caught between worlds becoming ever stronger as time goes by. I oft feel like I am caught between them all. I exist in many, but I’m never fully in one.
Sometimes it’s the small things that highlight feeling out of place. I was in the UK when Belgium played their first match in the World Cup. By the time England kicked off against Croatia, I was on the Eurostar, having just crossed back into the Belgian border.
I sat at home in my parent’s house watching Belgium play. To an outsider, it would seem weird why I would particularly care about Belgium. On the Eurostar, I seemed to be the only one watching the England game. I read ethnically ambiguous enough that people would probably equally wonder why I cared that much about England either.
The bit that was probably the most culturally complex was the book launch. It’s something that I’d be hesitant to even try to explain to my white, European folk. To be fair, the event wasn’t quite what I had expected either. My father chose this to be a moment of community celebration rather than a traditional book launch. There was known community figures, including politicians and renowned activists. It was speech heavy, with people focussing on testimonies of their relation with my father.
The purpose, moreover wasn’t really to make money by selling books. My dad spent more money hosting the event then he would ever make financially. It was more about bringing people together and building community spirit rather than a commercial enterprise.
Language felt like the elephant in the room. I, working with my father, wrote the book in English. My strong writing skills and native English made it the most logical choice. I always had the concern that anything too complex would not be intelligible by the older Bengali migrants. I tried my best to keep things simple and understandable.
The event itself was held with speeches often in high-level, shuddho (‘pure’) Bangla. There was our local language, Sylheti mixed in too, since the event was majority Sylheti speakers. For people my age, it’s difficult to understand the high-speech of shuddho. We didn’t learn it growing up, and it was not spoken at home. There were parts we simply couldn’t understand.
I gave a speech in English. Honestly, I felt like I needed to fight for a spot to speak. In a space filled with known community figures, these were the speeches people gravitated towards. I found it frustrating. I was the one who did the large majority of the work on the book. I think our community can often get so caught up on performance that it forgets the importance of real dialogue and to give younger people a platform.
I found this a tricky speech to give. Partly because I felt like I wasn’t meant to be giving it. Partly because I wanted to move away from what is often said at such occasions. I wanted to emphasise the more human side of writing the book together, and more fundamentally, that the point of it was not to put my father up on a pedestal.
The book was instead to demonstrate his achievements through perseverance, despite mistakes and challenges. Eulogising people doesn’t actually help a whole lot. It just serves to intimidate, rather than inspire.
Fortunately I managed to get the tone broadly right. Enough humility with a clear message meant people received it well. I got positive comments from people, either directly or from my father. A good number of people understood my point, and were very warm towards me. For some, I don’t think it quite landed.
There was a lot of media coverage. Which makes sense, considering my father is chairman of a TV station. It meant the event itself got an incredible amount of press coverage in both print and visual media. Some reports chose to see the story more broadly – a child writing a biography with their father. Others omitted my name, preferring to focus solely on my father.
My parents reaction was also interesting. The pride in my speech was expressive once they heard how other people received it. Community viewpoint is something they have lived their lives by, and I had somewhat forgotten how important it was from them. Being a neurodivergent person who has lived my life caring very little for expected norms, it’s probably why I would not find a home in such a space.
Alas, I now find myself back in Belgium. My identity confusion will not get a whole lot of respite. I gathered my required documents and I will soon be able to apply for Belgian nationality. Belgium is also playing later today in the World Cup. At the same time, I’m probably feeling as disconnected to life in Brussels as I ever have done.
I can only hope that the feeling of outsiderness eases as my life eventually finds a new point of equilibrium. Yet I also must comes to terms with the fact that this is just how my life will be. I will, after all, be a person with three nationalities, living outside my country of birth with a peculiar cognitive profile.