568. The World is Always With Us

For the month of April I will participate for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year will be the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

After the Second World War, as a Londoner whose education was cut short by the war and who had lived through the German Blitzkrieg, my mother still went to night school and studied German. Wherever in the world we lived, she learned the language and did her best to teach it to me. As a result, although languages don’t come easily to me, I took great pleasure in learning French in elementary school and prided myself on my accent. Returning to live in England for a year or so after five years back in India studying Hindi and Bengali (as per the national three-language policy), I eagerly took the opportunity to catch up on my French, but was shocked by the attitude of my English classmates. We were lucky enough to have a French teacher from France but they complained loudly, in her presence, “Why do we have to learn French? Why can’t the Frogs learn English?”

the English-Only Movement in the United States

Some years after we immigrated to the United States, I encountered the same resistance in the English-only movement. This in the U.S., a nation of immigrants where scores of languages were spoken, Spanish in particular. And yet, increasingly, immigrants speaking other languages were seen as a threat. When Andrew and I moved to this university town as young parents, each of the town’s public elementary schools had a different bi-lingual education program: Spanish at Crocker Farm, Chinese at Wildwood (where Mum volunteered in her retirement), and Khmer at Fort River. Marks Meadow, the fourth elementary school in town, was the most international of all, since it was attended by the children of married graduate students from all over the world. But in 2002, a statewide referendum ended bi-lingual education in our public schools and these programs came to an end in our town as well, despite the fact that more than 16% of the population was born outside of the United States as my family was.

My adventurous Indian father and English mother lived in three different countries before settling in the United States when I was a teenager. Their friends from all over the world were always coming to parties or to stay for a while and, having left again, sending us letters with exotic stamps that I would steam off the envelopes for my stamp album. As a girl in India I read voraciously—in English—books by writers from the U.K., all over Europe, and the United States, but with only a sprinkling from India itself. Decades later, pursuing a graduate degree in English and then going on to teach, my chosen area of specialization was postcolonial literatures, works in English and English translation by writers from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora—people who had migrated far from their ancestral homes as a result of their colonization by foreign powers. Besides postcolonial studies, I also taught courses on post-WWII British literature and culture, the modern novel, the Indian novel, ethnic literatures of the U.S., Asian American literature, world literature, and global studies.

hit single, 1969

I grew up with an eclectic and international mix of music as well: English and American folk songs, Hindi film songs, Greek popular music, choral music, hymns and Christmas carols. In the 1960s and 1970s I followed the British top-ten singles charts, and listened to rock-and-roll, punk rock, blues, country, Indian classical music  and bhajans, reggae, and ska. Like the world that flowed freely through our home, unhindered by border check-points, so too did the music. It wasn’t something threatening, something outside; it was everywhere.

Immigrant families from Haiti on their dangerous trek through the Darién Gap in Colombia. (John Moore / Getty Images)

To be sure, I had an atypical upbringing. Only a small percentage of the world’s people have traveled abroad, although that varies a tremendous amount by country and by income, and an even smaller percentage, less than four percent, actually migrate from their country of birth. My family were serial migrants, but we migrated by choice. Nowadays, sadly, too much migration is driven by stark necessity, with some 130 million refugees and asylum-seekers forcibly displaced by war, ethnic or religious persecution, climate catastrophe, famine, economic collapse. Some of the refugees are internally displaced, forced to move out of their homes within their own country, while others must make long, dangerous treks over land and sea in search of a safe haven. Still others are stateless in a world organized on the basis of nation-states, without even the protection of a passport.

Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Cox’’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 2018. (Photo: WFP/Saikat Mojumder)

The number of displaced people at home and abroad is growing year by year, and a shocking number of them are forced to live in refugee camps or on the streets. At the end of 2023, there were more than 653,000 homeless people in the United States, with tent cities proliferating nationwide. In January, 2024, Los Angeles County alone recorded more than 75,500 people as homeless on any given night. Worldwide, there were about 6.6 million people living in refugee camps. Some 880,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar live in Kutapalong in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, the largest refugee camp in the world.

Most recently, the world’s eyes have been fixed on Gaza, where Israel’s five-month assault by air and land since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel has driven 85% of the population—nearly 1.9 million people who were already refugees—from their homes, and displaced them again and again as they continue to be bombarded. The population of Rafah, a town in southern Gaza, has swelled from 280,000 to 1.5 million as desperate Palestinian refugees struggle to survive in makeshift tent cities without electricity, running water, or health facilities, and with starvation and another ground invasion looming.

        Satellite image showing a makeshift tent city in Rafah

In my small town in Western Massachusetts, I am privileged to have a home, heat in the winter, electricity, hot running water, and complete food security. But still, there are nearly 3,500 people without homes in my county and the two counties adjacent to mine. We are not immune to global forces either. Refugees—from Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Haiti—are seeking housing and employment in our region. Americans may try to shut out these global displacements, but it is nigh-impossible to do so, unless they are prepared to shut themselves up indefinitely in walled, gated, heavily armed fortresses. To the extent that we attempt to shut them out, we are no better than the armed vigilantes who patrol the southern borders in Texas or the current candidate for President who refers to refugees and asylum seekers as “vermin” that seek to “contaminate our blood.”

Feb. 1, 2022: The Pan-African flag joins the United Nations flag in front of Amherst Town Hall, in celebration of Black History Month.

The pervasiveness of this mentality, even in my liberal college town which is one of eight sanctuary cities in our state and has long been engaged in international affairs, was brought home to me during a recent campaign I worked on to pass a town council resolution in support of a ceasefire in Gaza. I was bewildered to be faced, again and again, by elected councilors and fellow residents saying that it was not appropriate for the council to engage with global issues that had no bearing on or connection to our town. Really? In this day and age? Is there anything anymore that is not global?

We may not be living in tents—at least, not yet—but the winds of the world are blowing through our communities nonetheless.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

458. Graduate School

This is the seventh entry in a month-long series, Fifty years in the United States: An immigrant’s perspective, as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

Graduate School. 

In 1987, twelve years after having completed my B.A. in English, I found myself in graduate school in an English MA-PhD program. I say “found myself” because never in a million years had I considered going for a doctorate until I was actually doing it. After moving to the farm in the early 1980s and casting about for some worthwhile employment in the surrounding towns, it struck me that since the local schools were failing to teach the children to read, I might usefully get my M.A. in Teaching and become a reading specialist. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but reading had always been my passion. However, the local state college didn’t offer enough courses to enable me to complete the MAT, so they recommended that I apply to the nearest state university, some 30 miles away. With a two-year-old baby a 60-mile roundtrip commute already pushed my limit, so UMass Amherst was the only graduate school to which I applied, and the English department only had an MA-PhD program. Though initially I told myself that I could simply stop at the M.A., it was soon clear that I was going to go all the way. But if my graduate studies came about by accident, then—despite the inevitable, and not inconsiderable, costs to other areas of my life—it was a fortunate accident, because in some very important ways they brought me back to myself.

I have always been told that I talk too much. My primary school report cards said so, and so did my high-school friends’ entries in my autograph book. The move to high school in the U.S. at fifteen didn’t shut me up either, as I felt fully accepted by my small group of friends, all of whom for one reason or another were not part of the myriad cliques that divided the school. But college did silence me. My typical mode as an undergraduate was to slouch in the back with dark glasses on, metaphorically speaking, feeling completely out of place, and routinely tormenting myself at the thought of all my parents’ hard-earned money that I was wasting. I made few friends in my first two years there and spent more time wondering what I was doing there than actually doing something. It was only after taking a year off to study in London that I returned to the States with a sense of purpose, and finally learned a great deal in my final year. But most of the time I felt like an outsider in an alien environment with people who didn’t understand or include me and didn’t have the least interest in doing so. No doubt many fellow-students felt that way too, but my old gregarious self went into eclipse during those years, especially in classroom settings, where I hardly said a word unless called upon.

Merle Hodge

Returning to university for graduate school, I was a few years older than most of my cohort, and had the confidence of the intervening years of life experience. It was also very lucky for me that at the outset I met a group of young international faculty from India and South Africa, barely older than I was, who mentored and introduced me to an emergent field that I seemed to have been waiting for all my life. Looking at the course catalog for my first semester I noticed that a Dr. Ketu Katrak, a professor with an Indian-sounding name, was offering a course called “Commonwealth Literature.” Interesting, I thought, literature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? But it turned out to be literature of the British Commonwealth, the name the Britisher gave to an emergent body of writing that, in the late 1980s, was about to rename itself postcolonial literature.

Chinua Achebe

In that first course we read works by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ousmane Sembène and Ama Ata Aidoo from Africa, by Merle Hodge and George Lamming from the Caribbean, Anita Desai and Mulk Raj Anand from India, and I was hooked. Where had these works been hiding all my life? As an undergraduate I hadn’t been able to read anything other than British and American literature written well before the Second World War. A Passage to India (1924), the most recent British novel on the curriculum there and the only one set in India, had been written by an Englishman, albeit a wonderful writer deeply critical of British colonial rule. With Ketu Katrak graciously consenting to become my dissertation director, I immersed myself in the study of twentieth-century literatures from India, Africa, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora and the years just flew by, until one day Andrew gently reminded me that perhaps it was time for me to finish up, and at last I did, eight years after I had begun.

I was only taking two courses a semester because I was teaching at the same time and Nikhil was only two years old when I began my studies. Both my guys were nothing if not supportive. Andrew and I barely saw each other during those first years of grad school, because he was with Nikhil in Winchendon while I was away at UMass and I was with Nikhil while he was away at the press in Boston. Dear Andrew would occasionally nod off while reading bedtime stories to Nikhil and I would return to find the baby wide awake, beaming from ear to ear, with his dad fast asleep and snoring. Returning to Winchendon the day of my PhD qualifying exam, little Nikhil told me that he had kept all his fingers crossed for me all day. As a three-year-old he rode to the administration offices on my hip when the unionizing graduate employees were calling for family health insurance and childcare support (both of which we won). And he met many of the postcolonial writers and scholars who passed through the five-college area, including Anita Desai and her teenage daughter Kiran, who babysat for him for a semester while I was taking an African literature class with Chinua Achebe.

Shakespeare-Wallah (1965)

I’ll close with an anecdote from graduate school that exemplifies what I’ve been trying to feel my way toward. One semester I was auditing a Shakespeare class with the brilliant Normand Berlin (who at twice our age put us students to shame with his energy). My classmates knew their Shakespeare much better than I did; but of a class full of Shakespeare lovers, the two students who were head-and-shoulders above the rest came from Asia: one woman from Manila, the Philippines, and the other from India, a Bengali woman from Calcutta. My point is that in this particular context in the late 1980s, foreigners and immigrants like us were not outsiders, but at the center of an exciting new literary-cultural movement. We didn’t have to slouch in the back with dark glasses on as I had as an undergraduate. (America’s honeymoon with the Other didn’t last long; but that’s another story.)

The point is that this new field of literary studies gave me permission to delve deeply into literature and history that told my story and the stories of my parents. While the British Empire had invaded countries around the world and grown wealthy at their expense, my father had traveled to study in England, where and my mother had met and fallen in love, returning to India with her after my birth. I had grown up in newly Independent India in English-medium schools reading English children’s books (very good ones, I hasten to add). But it was only after coming to the United States that I started studying the literatures, cultures, and histories of the countries I had left behind. Now it became my mission to help students who might not have been exposed to this wealth of literature from around the world to fall in love with it as I had, and to see that the world was there to learn from rather than to dominate.

I was still talking too much, but now I had a captive audience.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents