'Nostalgic For A Place Never Seen' Review | A Journey Through Memory, Displacement, Longing

Nostalgia is our race’s Janus-faced old companion—simultaneously looking back and looking forward with someone or something constantly tugging at us from behind. Giving in to it is not a luxury but sometimes the order of the day, providing us with the wisdom of knowing who we are, the “roots” and “routes” that have gone into the making of it. In a world so fraught with conflict and displacement, it is only natural that more and more narratives would emerge that talk of these two R’s. For the people of the 온라인카지노 subcontinent, who have had the shared and traumatic history of the partition and then the Bangladesh Liberation War, it is a fertile and necessary motif in the collective cultural psyche and fiction. Stories that have been churned out from the oeuvre of survival and settlement need to be passed on to the next set of readers and listeners, lest they are lost in the official and overarching historiography of the nation. The world, since time immemorial, has progressed and lived on stories being told and retold—that has been the basic starting unit for any community. 

Bhaswati Ghosh’s debut collection of poems, Nostalgic for A Place Never Seen, is about all this and much more. Growing up in New Delhi and now residing in Canada, Ghosh traverses and inhabits multiple worlds—cities of her childhood and adulthood, towns she has visited during her travels, and villages which she hasn’t but whose sight and sound have been made real through their recounting by her grandmother’s storytelling. Time and space coalesce and overlap, because that is exactly the way memory functions—without rules and without warning. 

The collection is divided into multiple sections, but the quiet river that runs through them all and holds the collection together is a longing for a place never seen and for places where the poetic voice hasn’t been to. They say one never visits the same place twice, because something in the mind’s eye has already altered to make us see the place differently. Ghosh’s places are sensuous spaces, worlds of sight and sounds punctuated and defined by stories and their retelling from memory, where personal history, anecdotes, and laments swirl and jostle. This act is as much for recording as it is for preservation. Take, for instance, the closing lines of the poem First Flush— 

“The heart is but a travelling historian.”

One must also be aware of the performative aspect of this preservation and the race against the chariots of time to ensure these stories are not lost. Ghosh poignantly writes in the poem Ageing Wine—

“Fine wine,
they call it. We call it nostalgia.
We call it love.”

With the world shrinking at the speed of light and the promise of borders that separate fading away, the reality that stares back at us is something else. With the rise of totalitarian forces and governments, where identity is seen to be boxed up in markers of religion and ethnicity, giving into nostalgia cannot be dismissed as an exercise of indolence and indulgence. Rather it becomes an attempt at creating a museum of artefacts and lost traditions, ranging from the sartorial to the culinary. Bhaswati Ghosh in her debut novel Victory Colony:1950 had dealt with the trauma of displacement. But for the displaced, what gave them a sense of community and belonging was their culinary exercise—it was in the makeshift kitchen in the refugee camps that they were holding on to the vestige of a country that was no longer their own. Such reminiscing is an important motif in Ghosh’s world. In the poem Displaced Persons’ Colony she writes,

"That afternoon, I learned hunger on

a hot summer day can turn your brother

into a fast-track cook in a semi-constructed kitchen.

That a meal of steaming rice and hot potatoes

can surpass any other in the world.”

When one is writing from memory and about memory, there is always this danger of the narrative/poems exposing the gap and distance between intention and execution. But reading Ghosh’s poems one is overwhelmed by the sensuosity of it all—as if the poems were written on the threshold of the courtyard, the kitchen door or in the comfort of the quilt in the winter sun. Be it the poem Cumin or Arabian Jasmine, one is accosted by the sound and smell of the world that Ghosh presents in front of us—the sizzling of the cumin seeds in the simmering oil and the wafting of the jasmine wrapping the entire evening in her arms. The imagery is strong and steeped in the daily and lived reality which does justice to the burden of years of separation and trauma. The poems with a punch, like a sudden explosion of taste and smell. Ghosh has both the eye and ear for the everyday, for the trivial, for the minute and for the seasonal. The sentences are carefully measured and yet having a gravitas that promises to go beyond the discipline and the rigour of the poetic exercise and establish itself. Grandmothers and dwelling places appear and disappear, speaking to us, speaking of us—of lost time, lost countries and geographies, and postal codes and slowly vanishing people. Take, for instance, the poem, Temporary and Permanent,

My grandmother gave us her village address

noted with peripheral markers. Spatial jigsaws.

Sprawling fruit orchards, a pond ‘as big as a river.’

the temple my brother found

pieces of when he visited

the village years after

Grandma died

pining for it.

But is the overarching mood of this collection that of melancholia only? Ghosh’s poems steer past falling into this trap but rather examines cities and people as if under a microscope, trying to map the different moods and shades of places strewn across the globe. Delhi is chaotic and characterised by the hustle and bustle of survival. Mexico City and Buenos Aires have their own laid-back charm, almost as if the entire city is in a state of perpetual siesta. Physical spaces occupy a large section of this collection, because so much of what has been lost and pined for is associated with them. The exploration underlines the desire to experience and belong and carry a little bit of places and people away with the self. At the same time, the subtle realisation lurks in the background that this might not be completely possible. 

If there is the personal lament of lost cities and relations in these poems, there is also the political, which has greater and more universal ramifications in this current day and age. Poems like Things I Imagine Telling My Niece and Wrapping Love critiques the dominant hegemonic ideology of the Right Wing and bats for personal choice and agency, regarding what should one wear, eat, read and speak about. The poems are as much about seeking as they are with the way that knowledge will be preserved and disseminated. Language and dialects recalled from memory have been carefully stowed away in glass jars, almost pickled for later consumption and posterity. 

Good literature makes us aware of a network of connections; a poem/ novel appeals to readers across language and cultures, uncovering a camaraderie that exists between other poets and authors and shared concerns and angst. Reading through Ghosh’s collection, one is stuck by this peculiar quality and the association and affiliation with other poets and novelists who have shared a similar predicament to her. Thus, in Fading Colour, when she is talking of letters and their colours, one cannot but see similar concerns raised by Agha Shahid Ali when he writes about “Half Inch Himalayas” and that “Kashmir shrinks in my mailbox.”. Similarly, there is the concern with the “chutnification” (to borrow the term from Rushdie) of language and history in Pickling Language.

The poems seem to have been sat with, carefully polished and chipped at and then presented with utmost care. There is seldom a sense of the “spontaneous overflow” but rather, a child who has been brought up with the time s/he deserves and much more. It is difficult to run away with this collection in a couple of reading sessions. It makes you think, ponder and meditate. Especially for those who have the inherited the trauma of separation, riots and communal fragmentation. It also speaks to those who are now separated from their land, either through exile, voluntary or forced—nostalgia is their race’s closest confidant and also the enemy that knows them the best.

(Sayan Aich Bhowmik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Shirakole College. His articles and reviews have appeared in 온라인 카지노 사이트 Magazine, The Dhaka Tribune, and The Wire.)