A moment of transience
By Mehdia Hassan
My stay was transient
Like the winds and waves of the St. Lawrence River, near my Baba Jan’s house
I hold onto his hand firmly, I hold onto this moment dearly
It will never be the same, not this young again
We always come here to skip rocks when I visit him
“Choose a rock, any rock, and throw it into the water”
I see magic happen, as the warmth washes over me – a dream
But he sees Kabul’s mountains, when I only see trees
My stay was transient, but I have so many questions: Are those real reflections on the water? Why does the sunset feel like a sunrise to me?
He remembers when our family first arrived here, how, when, and why
First, one bird makes the journey to fly here, then the next –
That’s how it starts, that’s how I am here
But he sees the birds flying away when I only see them coming closer to me
My stay was transient, and I know that I don’t know everything I want to know yet…
About those birds, about this place, about this time in space
So can we make this moment linger a little longer?
I hold onto his hand firmly, I hold onto this moment dearly – a dream
Because my stay was transient
“In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself,” Frantz Fanon powerfully remarks what resonates with me (1967, p. 229). In the same vein of Fanon, it is through retrospective meaning-making, in which we can disrupt systems of power within the nation-state, constantly reconstructing and representing who we are, in relation to the world (Bhabha, 1990; Chase, 2005). My painting and poem disrupt metanarratives that imply how migration journeys end at the site of arrival. Rather, I offer a possible counternarrative that makes visible the various nuances and blurry boundaries between the perspectives of first-generation and second-generation Afghan diasporic individuals (Mishra, 2007). I merge narrative and phenomenological approaches to, verbally and visually, capture the deep thoughts, feelings, emotions, and understandings of myself and my grandfather (Riessman, 2008). I take the creative risk to weave the lines of my poetry that most resonate with me, into my visual artwork, in order to add a complimentary layer of depth and reflection, multi-modally (Riessman, 2008; Chase, 2005; Sameshima et al., 2019). The narrative is non-linear, challenging colonial perceptions of time – one that has no end and is constantly evolving, as it merges how I understand my family’s migration story in the past, present, and future (Bhabha, 1994).
Through the artful dialogues between my painting and my poem, I open new possible spaces of transformative inquiry for how youth in diasporic communities can remake family histories of migration. In this way, I capture how the mysterious “beyond,” within the context of my family’s migration story, functions; this is evident in my painting, through the simultaneous sunset and sunrise, the birds flying, as well as my grandfather and I admiring it all from the river lookout on the rocks. I create a dynamic third space through my creative work, in order to express these feelings, experiences, and understandings of the diasporic imaginary (Mishra, 2007), which would have otherwise not have emerged to the surface. In my multi-modal creative work, I wholeheartedly embrace the ambiguity that propels new insights and social transformation.
The moments within the moment:
My Baba Jan says that the trees eerily mimic the shape of the mountains during the sunrise and the sunset; this is something I never noticed before. For my grandfather, it was perhaps his stay in Afghanistan that felt most transient to him. What I learned later was that I was constantly revisiting these similar moments and dialogues for years, each time my grandfather and I came to this spot to skip rocks by the river. This feeling of repetitiveness is also embodied creatively in certain lines of the poem. It is as if the many moments culminated into one, for me to tell this story.
The Beyond: A sunset within a sunrise
Past family histories of migration and displacement are not as distant as they seem, shaping the present and futures of diasporic youth (Bhabha, 1990; Ni Laoire et al., 2010). The painting and the poem, each having pedagogical value on their own, artfully capture the liminality involved in being a second-generation Afghan youth in Canada, from my perspective. The sky and the water are where our new and current understandings of the self are being projected onto, but not entirely mirroring each other in the reflections.
The beyond is an in-between space that innovates – a space of invention and re-invention, where the unrepresented pasts that “haunt” the present have the possibility to emerge (Bhabha, 1994). The beyond questions binary divisions between old and new, past and present, here and there, as it challenges people’s “authentic” points of origin; this illusory desire for authenticity fascinates me (Bhabha, 1990; Mishra, 2007). To my grandfather, it feels like he is watching a sunset that is getting dimmer, like his story is ending, filled with mourning and melancholia of the place he knew as Afghanistan. I see the sunset as a sunrise, as I am reminded that diasporas are evolving along with the nation-state and that “diasporic subjectivity is always en route, never rooted” (Mishra, 2007). While there are losses in migration, there are also gains in ongoing connections and community interactions. I am creating the space for my counternarrative of recognition to be present within Canadian “multicultural” narratives.
The flying birds
Furthermore, there is purposeful ambiguity in the painting about which direction the birds are flying towards. It is meant to provoke the viewer’s curiosity to explore the liminality involved in the migration of the birds. The birds represent the transmission of memories, feelings, and legacies of teachings between different generations of family, constructing moments from the past and present (Mishra, 2007). Traumas and losses of migration are shared between generations, which soften the rigid boundaries between first-generation and second-generation diasporic individuals. The Kabul mountains are not as familiar to me, as the landscape along the St. Lawrence River and my grandparents’ place in Cornwall. It is partially why the mountains are not reflected in the water, alluding to how the real and the imaginary are defined by our various perspectives.
It is also important to note that Cornwall, Ontario is on the traditional Indigenous territory of the Haudenosaunee, Mohawk, and Huron-Wendat peoples. As racialized settlers who directly migrated, or have ancestors who migrated to this colonized land, it is not enough to decolonize our minds, for a decolonial future (Tuck & Yang, 2012). We are all birds who stayed. We need to work together with Indigenous peoples to actively unsettle settler colonialism, including the repatriation of land, and recognize the Indigenous histories of the land before settlers had arrived (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
The river lookout that we always visit
The way I see the view from the river lookout differs from how my grandfather sees the view because our perspectives are shaped by our unique lived experiences. I also revisit our positions across time and space, such as in the past and the present, pointing to how we imagine the future. Through our many deep conversations and dialogues, we better learn about ourselves and understand our world (Freire, 1970). When my grandfather and I go to the river lookout spot and we skip rocks into the river together, we are actively in the present moment constructing our realities, while remembering how we have always been doing this activity in the past.
My work is an autoethnography in some ways, as I turn the analytic lens to myself and disrupt the politics of traditional research relationships, pushing the methodological boundaries of knowledge-production (Chase, 2005; Taber, 2010). It is important to note here that there is no “authentic” position to see from or read from (Henry, 2010). When we lookout to the river, we see representations of our ideas, feelings, and emotions captured; they may be distortions, illusions like the diasporic imaginary, and narratives that unfold in unexpected ways each time we encounter the artwork or read the poem (Riessman, 2008). The moment is one of transience; it will never come again, nor be recreated in the exact same way; there is beauty in that, as the knowledges of ourselves and our contexts deepen through narratives (Chase, 2005). We are inhabiting the beyond, endlessly recreating ourselves in the present, in all these encounters with newness (Bhabha, 1994).
The lingering of this moment
While it feels as though I have been unravelling the intensity of one long, lingering moment throughout this work, my narrative collapses time and space. I am yearning as a way of knowing, weaving a diversity of knowledges together, and striving to extend my learning journey beyond the narrative(s) that my grandfather and I tell together, within this creative work (hooks, 1984). The dialogues between my painting and poem hope to create a productive counternarrative, disrupting hegemonic metanarratives, so that diasporic communities can remake alternative, anti-colonial realities (Dei, 2010).
In my multi-modal work, I take the creative risk of poetically and visually imagining how the beyond manifests in my family’s migration narrative; as a site of collaboration and contestation in the present that is “restless, revisionary, ambivalent, constructed, renegotiated, transformed, and discontinuous” (Bhabha, 1994). The ambiguity and liminality in the painting and poem open new spaces for simultaneous, multiple interpretations to co-exist and complexify, provoking further discussion and inquiry for the audience (Sameshima et al., 2019). With the embracing of new pedagogical possibilities in how youth relationally see themselves in the present and future, comes the embracing of transience. I let the current moments fly like the birds on their own paths, hoping that they might transform into our memories, teachings, and legacies of migration. I know that I have my grandfather to thank for teaching me this, over the many years, at the river lookout, by the St. Lawrence River, in Cornwall.
Acknowledgements
This multi-modal work is based on my cumulative, enthused learnings in my fall 2021 Independent Research and Reading doctoral course, exploring youth migration and narrative inquiry. I am grateful to my Baba Jan for the invaluable wisdom he has shared with me throughout my life, and which continues to vividly inform how I see myself and the world around me.
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About: Mehdia Hassan (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto, OISE, with interests that include arts-based learning and research methodologies, youth wellness, anti-colonial theory, and migration. Mehdia is also a visual artist and youth arts educator based in her Toronto/Tkaronto inner-city neighbourhood of St. James Town. See her recent mixed media artwork, titled “Beyond Borders and Hyphens: The Journeys of Migration,” featured in the University of Toronto’s Research Revealed exhibition: https://researchrevealed.utoronto.ca/beyond-borders-and-hyphens-the-journeys-of-migration/
Keep in touch with Mehdia Hassan
Twitter @itsmehdia