"I can count one to 10 in Bengali,” she said. “When I was younger, my dad used to teach me Bengali, but I have forgotten it all.”
But two is all you need. One for Bangladesh, two for Russia. “A win for two countries,” she said. Straight from the horse’s mouth.
The identity of Margarita Mamun, with an alcoholic first name and a Bengali/Arabic last, like a double-barrelled cultural buckshot, was contentious, much like any child born out of two different versions of history may be.
A Facebook activist -- let’s call him that for now -- claimed that Bangladesh “had absolutely nothing to do with Margarita Mamun’s success. And by absolutely nothing, I mean zero, zilch, nada, nothing.”
As a writer, I would’ve stopped the buck at nada, for effect; as a pseudo-socio-political commentator, I would point to the deterministic nature of life and not write the sentence at all.
For the uninitiated, Margarita Mamun is a Russian-Bangladeshi (or Bangladeshi-Russian?) gymnast who won gold at the Rio Olympics this year. When asked, she herself claimed that it was “a win for two countries.”
If Margarita Mamun can claim that it was a win for two countries, why can’t Bangladesh, even if it is to serve its self-interest, claim a little slice of that glorious pie? Would that be so wrong?
Now this is true: Bangladesh isn’t the best country for wearing skimpy clothes and doing god-knows-what on a wooden beam. It is also true that Bangladeshi society isn’t conducive to following your dreams, if your dreams don’t adhere to societal expectations. It is true that many in our country would call her “semi-nude” display in public a blasphemous disregard of our conservative values.
Furthermore (and this will, indubitably, ruffle a few feathers, poke a few Bengali linguists in the tongue), Bangladesh, for all it has achieved, has not achieved much, not on the global arena.
You can maybe count cricket, where it has occasionally beaten a single over-dog, for which I am both proud and grateful, but elsewhere, if one thinks of Bangladesh, one thinks maybe floods, maybe Muslims, maybe “wait, is it that country next to India?”
This is, of course, a result of ignorance on a global scale. Also, perhaps, realistically, because, why would you know Bangladesh as anything more than that? What feathers do we have in our cap that would allow us to be recognised as anything but?
As a result, when someone wins gold in one of the most major sporting events, the fact that she’s half-Bangladeshi, and the fact that she recognises this heritage, matters. It feels great to claim greatness as ours, even if it’s a small part of it.
However, also true: This speaks for a major slice of Bangladesh, not the English-speaking, sexually liberated, women’s rights are my jam, LGBTQ+ till I die, free the nipple environment within which this conversation is taking place, thereby changing nothing, reaching nowhere that it matters.
Yes, Bangladesh is a terrible country for women; in fact, it sucks (if you’ll pardon my French). But to say Bangladesh had absolutely nothing to do with it is also wrong. The factors that influence our lives -- and in Margarita Mamun’s case, a big part of it was her father -- is of course hugely relevant to where she ended up.
Now, I don’t know much about Margarita Mamun’s personal family life; I’m not particularly interested. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that I’ve never been interested in the Olympics as a sporting event. But identity, especially in this age of the internet and globalisation and fast bucks and quick travel, is more complicated than ever. We have hot-blooded youths shooting up Spanish bakeries because they can’t figure out who they are in this landscape of corruption and conflicting ideologies.
We have “Bengali” people living “Western” lifestyles; we have children speaking Hindi before they can utter a single word in their mother tongue. Suffice it to say, it’s not a simple issue of her being Russian or Bangladeshi.
And Margarita Mamun, young as she is, diverse as she is, talented as she is, is, I’m sure, very much a product of her time. Assuming she was raised by a family which also included her father, a Bangladeshi who fell in love with a Russian (for now, I’ll see a certain beauty in that happenstance), a little of Bangladesh did help her become the successful athlete that she is now.
Maybe she can only count to 10. Maybe she doesn’t remember anything of Bangladesh or know anything of Bangladeshi culture. Maybe (if not definitely) if she had been born here, she’d be studying BBA at a private university like the rest of the teenagers/early-mid-20s youth you see smoking joints on your rooftop.
But, by the very union of which she was born, a little bit of the Bangladeshi influence has been imbued in her actions. And if Margarita Mamun can claim that it was a win for two countries, why can’t Bangladesh, even if it is to serve its self-interest, claim a little slice of that glorious pie? Would that be so wrong? Or does it deserve none of it, zero, zilch, nada?
SN Rasul is a Sub-Editor at the Dhaka Tribune. Follow him @snrasul.
