( 4 votes, average: 3.25 / 5 )
Loading ...For all you closet romantics and idealistic cosmopolitans, I’m sure you’re looking forward to seeing The Namesake as much as I am. It’s the latest splendourific creation of Mira Nair and promises to be just as delightfully poco and visually stunning as Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Massala. The Namesake, like Nair’s other films, takes a personal look at the cultural ambivalences of members of the Indian diaspora. The plot centres about a New York-born Indian professional who contemplates changing his embarrassing name, Gogol. Learning about the source of his name from his parents, he decides to visit India – a return to a home he has never known. Oh, and it looks like there is at least one love story.
I love movies like these. I think it’s because I’ve gone through the same disorienting experience of living most of life away from ‘home’. My family moved to Fiji when I was four, and I remember the childhood distress of wondering what I ‘was’. After being pulled out of the Sun Yat Sen Chinese school (after my parents discovered the public caning method of instruction), I attended an International School where everyone ‘came’ from somewhere.
Although I was born in Canada, my memories of Canada were hazy and mostly involved short holidays of Christmas, snow, and my grandparents. Somehow I didn’t think Canada was an appropriate place to be from. During a game of marbles on the school lawn, I contemplated the pasty colour of my skin and I decided that I was “Caucasian”… from “Europe”. I knew that my ancestors were from Scotland, and Europe seemed an appropriate place of origin. Although I was born in Canada, really I was European. White people came from Europe.
I still can’t remember when I realized that Canada was a legitimate place to be from. That I could be “Canadian”, and that my race didn’t define my home. But reflecting on this experience, I’m shocked by how early I attached myself to my race and to a ‘home’ (Europe) that I had never known. How I felt compelled to adopt a home that was different from both my birthplace and where I was living still puzzles me.
I think many other people share this experience of bumbling cosmopolitanism – being home, away, and nowhere at the same time. It’s the 21st century dream to belong to the international class, where home is two steps beyond passport control. But I wonder whether this dream is really possible. We need to be ‘from’ somewhere – not just to have roots, but to have the mental peace of possibly belonging. What I like about films by producers like Nair is that they show us how to embrace cultural complication without divesting ourselves of a home – wherever it may be.
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“In exile from exile” is how I put it, for myself. Years ago I ended my identity question by saying that I had no identity and I liked it best that way. But I have evolved even beyond this fluidity, now: when I was very young and asked where I was from, apparently I said that I am half Persian, half Bahá’í. But really, the only identity and root that I need is the latter. I am a Bahá’í both in faith and in culture, and I am nothing else.