It was George Lamming who said: “But the worl’ get small, small, ol’ man.” I can connect to anyone across the globe. I can tune in to Dish Network and find out what issues Zillur Rahman is navigating in Tritio Matra on Channel I or who is today’s guest at Aaj Shokaler Amantrane on Tara.
I can log in to Facebook and instantly connect to a few thousand like-thinking minds. I no longer feel estranged as I used to feel in yesteryears. My inner kaleidoscope can now process myriads of economic, societal, and cultural images, thus linking me and making me “what I am.”
My total image-system is no more dictated by any single-source point. The so-called “centre-periphery model” has greatly lost its importance. Arjun Appadurai, the famed social-cultural anthropologist, tried to explain this by introducing a neologism that uses the suffix “scape” (or image) posterior to appropriate prefixes (ethno-, media-, techno-, finance-, and idea).
These variegate scapes offer a spatial rendering of the present that is not “fixed.” It is complex, overlapping, disjunctive, amorphous, and incessantly flowing. On the powerful wings of these scapes, we apperceive and navigate our partly real and partly imagined “societal-cultural-economic-etcetera-etcetera-maze.”
Culture, like matter, also tends to creep towards uniformity, although not quite to the degree of homogeneity as in the case of inert matter. To be precise, culture is more like a flowing amoeba with sprouting arms and legs and mouths as dictated by its immediate environ. Evolving constantly in an amorous flux of “scapes” -- culture is amorphous.
Thus, I am no longer the “me” from the 70s, 80s, or 90s. I am a product of my today’s apperceived scapes -- both real and imagined. I am cent percent Bangali celebrating Boishakh while working through a busy day 12,000 miles away on the other side of this round globe. The globe, indeed, is round … yup, this is my newfound glocalised (global yet local) culture.
Indeed, it is a small world, and as Tom Friedman argues, it is a Flat World. The concept of world as a “global village” is only contradicted by the still prevailing concept of nation states. The powerful ripple of globalisation permeates every space. The policies formulated in the corridors of Washington DC can spell jobs in the slums of Dhaka. The untethering of China’s currency from the dollar can spell significant price-changes for average consumers in the US. And yet, an individual resides in a locus that is essentially “local.”
Thus, we see a Bangladeshi expatriate in the US spending leisure hours watching NTV and traveling back to home when it is time to look for a mate. In fact, none can deny this local pull and none can live in a space that is totally global.
This “Global-Local” interaction, especially for the expatriate diaspora, has altered the perception of our total existence in a profound way.
Depending on background (education/cultural grounding, etc) they experience differential apperception when confronted with complex, disjunctive scapes (of Appadurai).
My today’s manifest cultural identity is nothing but the end result of an intense interaction between my global exposure and my innate local (I mean Bangladeshi) sensitivity. One may aptly call it “glocal.”
Well, how is my own little microcosm? In my mid-teens, when I left my sleepy village for the town of Sylhet and matriculated at Murari Chand College, I stopped wearing lungi in the classroom.
There, I also got my first taste of the Ekushey Probhat Ferry. I discovered Rabindrasangeet. I morphed more into a Bangali than a Bangladeshi. Over the next five years, in professional school, it was rather a furthering of that same process.
But it was a colossal jolt as I crossed the “seven seas” to reach this distant El Dorado. Suddenly, I felt marooned. While hanging culturally “Trishonku” on the banks of the Hudson, I discovered a rather estranged expatriate Bangali culture perpetually rooted on the day of departure (from home) with no further significant evolution.
Years later, when I traveled back home, it was an even bigger cultural shock when I found my younger cousins more US-oriented than me. Thus, at home, I found myself “away-from-home” and again hanging “culturally-Trishonku.”
However, there were evolutions in other spheres as I interacted with a totally different culture. My perspective as to the value of work changed. My perspective as to the professionalism of a professional changed. I realised it is not okay to throw a banana peel on the street. And in a strange way, despite the distance, my love for home grew even stronger!
All those events and life experiences offered a series of complex and disjunctive scapes. I adjusted and readjusted, and thus evolved.
Lastly, my daughters here are oriented more towards Bollywood songs than Rabindranath. On Eid, they pray and visit friends and family with joy.
During Puja, they sing and dance. They are not bothered by “Khuda Hafiz” or “Allah Hafiz” because they have other options for saying “goodbye.” I hope that they will follow their parents. But their scapes are different. Their cultural construct is different. I would rather let them fly on the wings of their own scapes and images and construct a culture of their own.
