Tag: Change

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Life in Pieces: the Attempt of Life Writing

This paper was something I wrote for an English class in university. Thanks to a flexible teacher, and an open invitation for an assignment, I was able to have a lot of fun and tackle a topic that was really meaningful to me. We were asked to write for an audience other than our professor, and to write in a style that would be appropriate for our chosen venue. So, with her permission, I wrote for my blog. I’ve changed some of citation formatting used in the original paper, but other than that, here it is:

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Life in Pieces: the Attempt of Life Writing

“Where are you from?” The question seemed to suck the air out of the room. Pictures and memories filled my mind. The home that I grew up in. The dusty streets I played in. School in the mountains. Fog and rain hovering over the trees as the monsoons poured from the skies. Too many memories. Then, in Canada, there was my grandparents’ house. Summers spent picking raspberries and running to the community pool.

“Three Hills, Alberta.” It was simpler. No need to explain the torrent of memories with its confusing variety of places. Three Hills was a piece of the truth. A small piece. The real truth was too messy. Where am I from? The answer, if there was one, was in stories — memories and pieces. But people don’t want pieces, they want history. A history that can be fit on a page.

History is not just the story you read. It is the one you write. It is the one you remember or denounce or relate to others. It is not predetermined. Every action, every decision, however small, is relevant to its course… (plaque in Canadian War Museum, Ottawa)

27 December 2007.

Benazir Bhutto is assassinated in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. A man levelled a gun at her as she was leaving a rally, standing in the skylight of a car. She was shot twice — once in the neck. A few seconds later, a second man detonated a bomb he was wearing. Almost two dozen people around the car were killed in the blast.

I remember standing in the darkness on our roof, staring out over Hyderabad at the glow from burning tires, dancing on the walls of apartment buildings nearby. There were people shouting. I could see a figure walking in the dark street below, carrying a large tv he had looted from a store. We had a small stack of loose bricks on the roof. I can’t even remember what we ever used them for. But that night I asked my dad if I could throw one down from the roof. I was fourteen. I suppose it made sense to me at the time. Looters were in the streets below. Justice could be mine to deal out in the form of a brick. They wouldn’t even know where it came from. It would just drop on them out of the darkness. I’m glad my dad said no.

We had people over at our house for a late Christmas get together. They ended up staying the night since it was too dangerous to go home in the rioting. They slept in different rooms around our house. It was like a multi-family sleepover. My dad drove a few families back to their homes in the quiet of the early morning, when the chaos had died down. Soon after, the rioting started again, and no one could go anywhere.

History remembers the death of the first female Prime Minister of the Muslim world. I remember the fires burning across the city. I remember a brick.

History, like narrative, becomes, therefore, a process, not a product. It is a lived experience for both reader and writer (Hutcheon 306).

Prairie Heart

I long to see that surging ocean
of grasses in the breeze,
I long to hear the gentle winds
wash o’er the emerald seas.

I long to gaze across the world
and see where sky meets earth,
I long to breathe the moving air,
that gives my life rebirth.

I long to be on that pleasant sea,
the true pacific calm,
I long to ride the waves of grass,
where a prairie heart is home.

I wrote these lines four years ago. I hadn’t even left Pakistan yet. I never would have written them today. There’s something naive about them — not just in the style, but in the longing. I never actually had a prairie heart. I had pictures from Grandma and Grandpa. Memories from the long drives across Canada the few times we were visiting “home.”

Reading these lines now, I realize what I wanted most. Not to be home in Canada — it felt the least like home — but just to have a home. To belong somewhere. I suppose I thought I could write home into existence. I thought I could write a past I didn’t have. I wanted to be the prairie boy missing home — but I was a boy whose only prairies were the yellow fields I saw in calendars from Canada, hanging on the wall by the light switches in my parents’ bedroom.

***

“You grew up in Pakistan?” At some point the question gets old. I always know what comes next. I’ve it so many times before — that question that was never thought through enough before it came bumbling out of someone’s mouth in an effort to understand. “Pakistan, eh? What was that like?” What was it like? What was eighteen years of my life like? What was eighteen years of travelling, learning, living, loving like?

“Good.” The answer usually seemed as empty as the question. Though, at least they tried. I’m never sure what kind of answer was expected. A quick history of my life? A few colourful descriptors for a country they didn’t know or understand? I never know.

“To write of anyone’s history is to order, to give form to disparate facts; in short, to fictionalize. […] narrativization is a form of human comprehension, a way to impose meaning and form on the chaos of a historical event.” (Hutcheon 302)

We went to a lot of museums, growing up. I would usually run ahead, looking at all the displays while my parents read the descriptions on the exhibits. I wasn’t as patient. History was what I could see — old tools, pottery, weapons, and clothes. Objects from years passed. Objects from foreign places. History. I would stare at them through the glass where they sat protected, contained, preserved; their labels and descriptions filling in the gaps between seeing and understanding.

***

I had a small bug collection given to me when I was a boy. Someone was passing on the small selection: a scorpion, a few butterflies, a large centipede, and a few others. Each of them were impaled with tiny pins to keep them on their display. I always wanted to add to it. I would catch butterflies with all their vibrant colours, wanting to keep them forever and preserve them on my board.

But I was never able to add one to my collection. I couldn’t bear to kill them — to stick that pin through in that piercing act of documentation. And so my board never got more bugs. I can’t even remember what happened to it. It used to sit up on a shelf with its small rows of exoskeletons, collecting dust.

I would try to draw the butterflies instead; sketching the intricate veins that traced through the wings, trying to bring them to life with crayola colouring pencils, as best as my sixth grade scribbling could do. But even these were a flat replica at best. The butterflies were always most beautiful when I saw them free, resting on a flower — their vibrant mosaics opening and closing to reveal their kaleidoscope wings.

My grandparents have a glass display of butterflies at their house, hanging on the wall by the back door. Sometimes I take it off the wall to look at the wings from the other side — the hidden side, with their subdued browns and earthy tones.

Memory

A few days
its deep purple petals
splash their vibrance — a radiant violet
sunset.

But too soon
the stem begins to feel its scar.
Like dried blood, its colour
browns.

In time
each pale and crinkled tissue drops
until only a skeleton stem remains.
It too, soon,
will fade

It took me a while to begin peeling back the layers of memories from Pakistan. I had realized it was easier to be Canadian for conversations. It wasn’t worth having to explain my life story to everyone. Besides, it usually didn’t explain anything.

But alone, on paper I would sink into the recesses of memory — to look at scars of memories I had covered up because they were too complicated to talk about. Good scars. I began to write the stories — to order the places, people, and words. In his book Running in the Family Michael Ondaatje wrote, “History is organized” (p. 26). But people aren’t. Most times my stories don’t seem to have any order at all. They’re just pieces. Good times. Hard times.

***

I used to push back against anything Canadian in me. There was a feeling that accepting the fact that I was here now would mean rejecting the fact that I was ever anywhere else. It was either one or the other. So what was I? Pakistani? Canadian? Both; and yet somehow neither.

Somewhere along the way I accepted that I would never be Canadian. I’d never be Pakistani either. I’d just be stuck somewhere in the middle. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe being stuck in one or the other was what I feared most — the fear that kept me drifting.

***

To write self-reflexively of history as a process in progress, instead of as a completed product, is to breakdown the finality of the formal narrative closure. (Hutcheon 312)

Today, some of the confusion has left. I’m still faced with the impossibility of trying to mediate a past full of memories and experiences that seem to escape me. I try to write glimpses and fragments of a world I can never really capture.

Somehow there is solace in the past. There’s something both frightening and exhilarating about reaching back into memories — rearranging, reordering, reliving. I wonder sometimes if it’s really the past I’m trying to understand or if it’s actually the present. Maybe I’m just ordering the pieces of myself, trying to make sense of it all. But in the end, there’s often little sense to be made. There’s no real story to tell, no lesson — just pieces. Pieces that, in some ways, die the instant they’re put on a page — contained and preserved, their angular skeleton strokes lying in neat rows of letters. They become lifeless, ordered history.

The stories we live are rarely like the stories we read — like those in we find in history. We may try to lay out and describe a person, down to the last bone of their body, but the result is never a person. The Japanese have a style of painting called hatsuboku, or “splashed ink”, where artists splatter ink onto a page and then paint with what is is on the paper — the little drops of black ink, waiting come to life. You have little control over how the paint gets on the page — only what you paint with it once it’s there. Life writing tends to be similar. We don’t choose the events that happen to us, but we make the best of what we are given and paint a picture as well as we can.

Despite the failures of writing in capturing life, there’s something valuable about it as well. It’s a chance to learn and make sense of the jumble of memories and experiences that make up a person. The finished product will be far from the actual life, but it will be an attempt — at best, a sketch of a butterfly with crayola colouring pencils. Like Michael Ondaatje said of his Running in the Family: “The book again is incomplete”(p. 201). Life writing will always be incomplete. It’s only ever an endeavour, in scraps and pieces, glimpses and glances, to capture the life of a person and the memories that make them who they are.

***

Quotes taken from:

Hutcheon, Linda. “Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge.” Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Ed. Sam Solecki. Montréal, Canada: Véhicule, 1985. Print.

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Print.

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Fall Leaves

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Fall is here. It seemed to come almost out of nowhere. One day all the leaves were green, and the next they were red and yellow, and half of them were on the ground. Now my feet kick up all those loose pieces strewn along the sidewalks.

I forget how much I love fall. I love the cool days, as the trees look emptier and emptier by the hour and sway gently in the breeze. The wind blows through the streets, scattering the leaves across the road and into little dips or corners where they lie, trapped, restless. The hedges begin to drop their leaves as well, and soon they start to look naked. The houses that were normally hidden behind them suddenly find themselves exposed for all to see. The bare skeletons of the hedges seem to fit right in with the thin bars of the gate that leads into the fading lawn around the apartment, usually open and creaking gently on it’s hinges.

Fall brings back memories of our furloughs in Canada, the few times we happened to be staying in Ontario or travelling through BC. I think the trees were prettier there — or there were more of them. Fall reminds me of what Canada was for an eight year old, walking down sidewalks of a country that wasn’t really his own, but was somehow supposed to be. It reminds me of rushing out the door with coats on to run with my brother across the road and climb on the big tanks outside the armoury. To feel the cool metal of their hard shells and trace my finger over the glass of the tiny peephole with it’s spiderweb cracks running down through all the layers of the bulletproof glass. It reminds me of those wars we fought in, hanging off those armoured sides, firing pinecones out the gun, that happened to become grenades later if they needed to be — those wars that stopped for supper, or for two little boys’ bladders when necessity and desperation called us back to the house.

Now these memories come with each leaf that skitters along the sidewalk, as the cool air gnaws at my face and I find myself in the body of this twenty-one year old. I watch and listen to the kids that climb all over the school playground by our house, squealing with delight. Their fall coats hanging off them, like half-ignored mother’s attempts to keep her children warm. Their cheeks are probably pink like mine, their hands cool from the multicoloured bars they climb on and cling to. My own cold hands grip the blue metal of my bike handle bars as I pass them by, off to university where this twenty-one year old body belongs.

Fall is full of change. There’s something almost melancholy about watching the world, filled with its rusty reds and turmeric yellows begin to unravel before your eyes. I’ve kept a few red leaves in some vain effort to freeze time. Preserve, preserve. Change is beautiful. Can’t it stay like this forever? It never does. I suppose it wouldn’t be change if it did. Instead, once the leaves are all off and the colours rust into a earthy brown, there’s nothing left holding back the next change.  And then before you know it, the leaves are covered in a blanket of white, there to stay until spring.

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When the Snow Falls in September

Snow in September? Really? It’s easy to forget sometimes, during the few months of summer, that Canada is a country of weather surprises. But, when the snow is falling outside my window in early September and I’m trying to decide whether I want to ride my bike to the university or not, reality sinks in pretty fast. P.S. buses are warm lovely things that swallow you up and then spit you out comfortably in front of the university.

A few weeks ago, my sister Lizzy and I moved into a two bedroom apartment in Edmonton. Starting with mattresses on the floors of our empty rooms, we’ve slowly watched the house become more like a home. It’s been fun. Canadian dumpsters have been one of our most bountiful resources when it comes to setting up a home. From love-seats to mixing bowl sets, Canadian dumpsters have it all. Our time hasn’t come without it’s hiccups though. Lizzy and I have had our moments already — realising that living together as siblings won’t be a walk in the park. But it’s been a delightful adventure, arguments and all. And with a little grace, it’ll continue to keep being one.

I’ve tried on numerous occasions to sit down and write, but so far it just hasn’t come together. There are times when my mind is a mess of words and emotions, and yet I can’t find time to think or write. And then, when I finally have a moment of peace to gather my thoughts and try to write, the words are all gone. It’s hopeless. I guess sometimes with words, too many is just as bad as not enough, and there’s rarely an in-between.

Edmonton is different. In many ways the change seems pretty easy. More cars, more people, more noise — all things I’m quite used to. It’s a beautiful city with character — not real character like any town in Europe, but Canadian character.

It’s not until I drive past Red Deer that I realise how much I miss from the place that was home for two years. It’s hard not to when you can see the massive “RDC” on the red bricks of arts centre from the highway.

I miss the smallness. I miss that I knew all of the campus at the college, and that my room in residence was never more than five minutes from my class. I miss that in 15 minutes you could basically drive anywhere in the city. I miss the fact that the library actually had free tables by the windows sometimes, where I could camp out for a few hours to work on a paper or a blog. I miss the people. I miss my friends.

Sometimes I forget I’ve let roots grow. And it’s not until I leave that I find out how much it hurts to tear them from the tiny cracks they’ve begun to settle into and get used to. But I rip them up to start over again. New classrooms. New streets. New faces.

It’s not as bad as it feels. This seemingly constant upheaval helps me see the months and years that God has carried me through. Every few years God takes a plough through my life and breaks everything up. Old things get buried. New things appear. Some things stay, just differently, like stones turned over to reveal a side you hadn’t seen before. For a while everything looks unknown, churned up and empty. But then slowly new growth appears, and green begins to peek out from the upturned soil again. I realise one ending is just another beginning, and it comes with a whole new set of lessons and adventures. It helps me see how much I have to be thankful for and to be reminded that God has more for me ahead. It will be different, but it’ll be good.

So when the snow falls in September and I feel tempted to be a Scrooge, I’ll choose instead to raise an Ebenezer and remember, “Thus far the Lord has helped us,” and I can trust He’ll continue to do so. (1 Sam. 7:12)

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Looking Back on a Less Canadian Me

My sister is finally in the same country as me again. Being with family always seems to be so normal and yet, at the same time, so strange. Though I spend months missing my family and wanting to be able to spend time with them, it routinely happens that as soon as I am together with them again, everything feels so normal that I hardly realise we were ever apart. With my sister, Liz, it’s certainly no different.

However, at the same time, I do find myself suddenly reminded of just how much we have grown and changed, and how long I’ve been in Canada. It’s been three years now since I came. It feels too long. It’s not that I don’t like Canada, it’s just that having so many years in a place other than Pakistan seems wrong somehow, for me. Seeing Liz again, I’m reminded of the time that I was in her place — new into the country, facing all these strange things that are so normal for people here. I can remember bumbling my way though “failed transactions” just trying to figure out how in the world I am supposed to pay for things with a debit card. Gas stations were strange and I had no idea what to do. I would get lost in Walmart and try to finding my way back to my parents, somehow always accidentally find myself amongst aisles of ladies underwear to my huge embarrassment. Subways were another mess of confusion. I have to choose which kind of cheese I put on these things? What kind of cheese is there? It’s written there on the glass. Everything is written on the glass. Why are there so many choices? I don’t know if everyone else in line appreciated my indecisive and uneducated sandwich confusion, which probably made my order take three times as long as everyone else’s. Oh well. I have since learned.

I’m amazed sometimes at the amount that has become normal now. I don’t realise it all the time, but there are so many aspects of living in Canada that have just become routine. I remember reflecting while driving into Edmonton a couple weeks ago, realising that here I was, on my way to a city I had almost never been to, to meet with my sister and see an apartment we were considering renting for the coming year. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that we were both in high school with homework and allowance money? Somewhere along the line, I guess we both did a little growing up. Not only that, but I realise how much I have adjusted to life here in Canada.

Almost a month ago I flew down to Colorado and, while I was there, made the mistake of saying “house”, not realising that Canadian’s have a fairly distinct way of pronouncing the “ou” sound. And, for one of the first times in my life, I found myself on the opposite end of accent teasing — the dreaded accent teasing. How did I get to the point where I’ve spent enough time in Canada for my accent to be so Canadian? A part of me hates it. I don’t want to be Canadian. I preferred the days when my accent was a mangled mix of British, American, German, Australian and New Zealand influences. I liked it when I said “football” for the game you play with your foot and “rubbish” for the thing you throw your garbage into. But, I guess adjusting is a part of life. Accents begin to sink in. Actually, I’m amazed sometimes how little it takes for my accent to start shifting and changing again. I can hear it, mid phone call with friends from the UK, slowly beginning to drop off it’s small Canadian nuances and settling into a slightly more English way of talking. Even during my short trip to the States, I found my accent becoming just that little bit more American. I guess I’m kind of like a sponge when it comes to accents. I’m just afraid that, as I get older, these shifts and changes will start to get slower and less common, and I’ll be stuck — stuck with whatever I happened to be last.

I’m so glad for times like this — to have Liz here and to be reminded of the amount of life that has happened since the last time we were together properly. It’s sad at times. Change always comes hand in hand with a feeling of loss. but I’m learning to appreciate the blessings of change as well. I don’t get lost in Walmart anymore, and I can order a sandwich at Subway without freezing up. Things have gotten easier. As Liz and I drove back from signing a lease on our apartment for the coming school year, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how far God has brought us along. So much growing already, and so much still to go.

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Pack, Unpack

With the school year so quickly coming to a close, I find my mind already beginning to pack up in my mind. I’ve thought briefly about the prospect of moving out of my room, trying to decide which things could even go one of these weekends and make the final move a little easier. Questions about the next step, the next place, the next home, have all started to seep into to my mind, swirling around my head at night when it’s time to be sleeping. I’ve started to begin the mental preparation that comes with packing up, pulling in the loose ends and getting ready to eventually pick up and go.

Packing has become almost second nature to me. Only a few months after I was born, my parents were packing up the things that they would take with them as they headed out to Pakistan, twenty years ago. We were always packing. When I went into boarding in sixth grade, packing suddenly became something that I had to deal with alone, joining all the other elementary kids doing the same. My mum would send me a packing list of what I should be bringing home for breaks, and slowly I would work my way through it, making sure not to forget anything I might need. Usually I would wait until the evening before we headed down the hill to the airport, before I would decide to suddenly throw everything together. That way I wouldn’t be needing things that were already packed. That was my excuse, at least. I can’t say that our houseparents were all too pleased with this method of packing, but it was pretty standard for most of us.

After a year or two, I didn’t need the lists anymore. It became pretty routine. Now, in college, I have a mental list of the essentials and I tend to leave my packing till the hour before I head to my grandparents’ house for the weekend, usually throwing my toothbrush and toothpaste on top just a few minutes before the bag is zipped up and I’m out the door and down the stairs. My bag seems to get a little bit lighter every time I travel. I’ve slowly learned not to take things like that extra pair of jeans or t-shirt that I’m not going end up wearing anyway. Travelling makes you realise how heavy your things become, so you learn pretty quickly to shed any weight you can.

Unpacking however, has been different. In high school I would come home to Hyderabad on school breaks for a couple weeks and decide to leave all my things in my suitcase. My mum would always tell me to unpack my things into the dresser and kind of “settle in”, but that never made sense to me. Why unpack a suitcase that was just going to get packed again in two weeks? Instead I would just slide the whole thing under my bed, so I could pull it out any time, get things out of it, and slide it back under — nicely out of the way. Only a day or two later, I would come into my room to find that my mum had unpacked everything into the dresser and the closet. “It’ll make you feel more at home,” she would always say. I would always argue, but I knew she was right. It did. Unpacking makes you feel at home.

Over the past two summers between my years of college I pretty much lived out of a suitcase for the entire time. I would pack my suitcase to go for two weeks at a time on a travelling construction crew, staying in hotels while we were away. When I came home I would stay at my uncle and aunt’s house, where I didn’t usually bother unpacking, since either I was about to go out on the road again, or if I was working in town, I would soon be packing to go stay with my grandparents for a weekend here and there. And of course, when I was visiting family in Pakistan, it was much of the same. I think my first summer I had four or five t-shirts that I cycled through my entire time in Red Deer: two blue, two green, one grey. I’m an extremely varied and exciting person, as you can tell. I’m sure people wondered if I actually even owned any more shirts. I just told myself that no one paid enough attention to realise that they kept seeing the same five t-shirts every time they saw me.

I have gotten a little better at unpacking though. Near the end of the summer I did eventually unpack into the dresser in my room in the basement of my uncle and aunt’s house, and made myself feel a little more at home. However I still find it hard to get passed the dilemma of whether it’s really worth unpacking, when in a few days or weeks I find myself putting everything back into my suitcase again. And this feeling doesn’t just end with packing “things” in a suitcase.

One of the first questions I faced coming to Canada in 2011 was: how much do I unpack? I was heading into Bible school in Saskatchewan, and everything was new. I knew I was only going to be there for eight months, and I knew I probably wouldn’t keep up ties with most people after the year was over, since I would be heading to Alberta, to a new college, in a new place, and would have to make new friends. I’ve heard, and witnessed in my life, that friendships with missionary kids tend to take on two forms, which I described to my roommate like this: “Either missionary kids go really deep really fast and drown a person, or they decide that that person isn’t even worth investing in anyway, since they’ll be gone before they know it.” That has characterised so much of my life. I feel like I’m constantly making that call, and sometimes I fear I lose some friendships along the way. It’s just that MKs say so many good-byes, again and again, and again. They know people don’t stick around forever, or that they themselves won’t, and they want to get the most out of the short time that they know the person — in an ‘all or nothing’ mentality. Thankfully I have eventually learned to handle friendships a little less intensely. I’ve learned to accept that every friend doesn’t have to be my best friend, and that, just because I may not see a person again, my friendship isn’t worthless.

I’ve always a question of how much I unpack. Do I let myself get settled, put down some roots, make friends, and enjoy a place? Or do I keep the roots short and thin to make sure they rip off easily the next time I have to pick up and leave? In this last month of school, I find myself beginning to make those little incisions around the roots, beginning to get ready for that moment when I’ll have to pull away from the things, places, and people that have been a part of my life for the last two years. I’m beginning to edge toward the door and put on my shoes and coat, so that all that’s left at the end will be to say a quick good-bye and disappear behind a closed door. That’s life.

When travel is a huge part of your life, packing and unpacking become second nature. But it’s always hard to know if we should let our roots grow and go through the pain of slashing them when it’s time to go, or if we should try to make the job at the end a little easier — a little less painful. Thankfully I’ve still managed to unpack during my two years here. I’ve managed to make good friends, that I imagine will continue, though they will probably be different. I’ve let myself enjoy things and invest in people and places, but I know I’ll pay a price soon. Before long I’ll be packing myself back into my suitcase. There will always be pain involved with packing up, but it doesn’t make it less worthwhile to unpack. On this, my Mummy is right. It’s taken me a while to learn that, in all aspects of life, but I am learning, slowly. And I’m encouraged by the fact that if we are rooted in Christ and not people, we’ll always have something to hold onto when everything else has to be ripped away. “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (Heb. 6:19). So pack, and unpack — it’s worth it; but cling the whole while to the Anchor that will not change, will not leave and will not fail.