Photo credit: Fassifarooq – CC BY-SA 4.0
I have traveled back and forth between America and Pakistan many times since I “left” Lahore on September 12, 1979. My 21st birthday. I set off to conquer the world and become the free, independent woman I had always dreamed of. Desi Patriarchy, at least that’s how I imagined it. Forty-five years of so many tearful and joyful reunions, farewells and arrivals now seem to have flown by in the blink of an eye.
These glorious six weeks of my life in my mid-sixties somehow felt different. Perhaps it was because I was now a middle-aged woman, no longer interested in intimidating or pleasing or impressing others. Finally, comfortable with who I am, I was able to embrace and share all of myself, my experiences, my political and artistic passions, my ever-growing zest for life, fun and adventure with deep integrity with all the people I meet, both in my personal and professional life. Perhaps that is why this time I felt more loved and accepted for who I am and who I have become. Or maybe my perspective has changed.
I now feel things, people, ideas more intensely than ever before. Maybe it’s because the premonition of death that dangled on the edge of my consciousness has now firmly moved to center stage. So my life has become a ship full of precious baggage. The only baggage I now recognize as worthy of its weight on this life’s journey is love. The weight of love paradoxically lightens the burden of life, but, as I now recognize, Kundera was right. There is an unbearable quality to this lightness: the unbearable lightness of being, of becoming, of love.
What is this unbearable lightness that shakes me to my core every time a plane lands on the runway of Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore, the city of my birth, childhood and adolescence? At the age of 21, I ran away from what is now too much love, the burden of loving/being loved by mother/land, the all too restrictive notion of patriarchy and its maternal patriarchy. A mother can be a patriarch too.
Escape. Escape. After more than 40 years of marriage and raising two children, far from home, this obsession with escape, with challenging norms and expectations, has continued to shape my mindscape. I have been a wife without being a wife, a mother without the patriarchal burden of maternalism. Above all, I have tried to be a friend (which may explain Forster’s paean to failed friendships). Route to Indiastill has the power to move me to tears. Friendship generates solidarity, and solidarity was the key that kept the flame of love for justice burning in my heart and unlocked the progressive political commitment that continues to connect me across the many borders I continue to cross. Escaping does not mean turning away from the demands of loving, but rather running toward a vision of a world in which boundaries of all kinds are erased, or at least negotiated. The loving pursuit of justice requires more than that.
And perhaps this border crossing from the US to Pakistan took on a more serious shape in the midst of a genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, backed by the same country I fled to escape the unjust restrictions of my home country.
I had the opportunity to share my school’s work in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance against Zionist colonialism, a fight I have been fighting in my 40 years of academic life in US universities dominated by Zionist professors and administrators. This is true throughout US academia, and is now being witnessed by everyone in the grotesque crackdown on students and professors who are speaking out and organizing for justice for Palestine amid the massacre of over 40,000 innocent civilians, mostly women and children, in the Gaza Strip to date.
Despite the Pakistani government’s lack of overt support for Palestine, other political repressive measures, and the obvious economic discontent and anxiety that the people suffer, the students I interacted with at some of the educational institutions where I spoke, like those in New Jersey, gave me great hope that love will triumph over hate and that activists will triumph over the politics of despair and cynicism. For example, at one university where I attended pro-Palestinian protests on various college campuses and many demonstrations and rallies in New York City, students expressed interest in starting a chapter of SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) at their school. At another campus, students chanted “Liberate Palestine, liberate Palestine” at the end of my talk.
So, back to crossing the border.
I was in Lahore, on the so-called jet plane heading “home” to the US after singing “pardesi, jana nahin” a few times. The audience had no idea how hard it was for me to sing this song without holding back the tears: “Don’t go, my love who is now a foreigner, don’t leave the people who love you here.”
Now I know there is no escape. We carry love with us, even when we fly far and wide. The finger that moves writes, and by writing we move forward. So we must live with the choices we make. But we can still exercise the will to love, the will to connect with others, the will to build solidarity based on our capacity for a better, more just world, within the limitations of our space and time, even when our choices are not satisfactory. Here, there, and elsewhere, I will continue to cast spells to bring back, in the words of the famous Punjabi mystic poet Bulleh Shah, my lost loved ones. I’m very proud of it and I love him. And if, in the course of casting the spell, I light a fire in the heart of the burning sun, This is important to me.So is it not a step toward justice? These powerful lyrics are ones I sang in Times Square to express my Punjabi-Pakistani solidarity with the jailed leaders of the Jenin Freedom Theater as I marched in Manhattan to protest the various oppressive tactics being used by the Israeli militarist state against the people of Gaza as well as Palestinians in the West Bank. As the Vietnam War protesters knew, and as all those protesting the Israeli genocide of Palestinians around the world now understand, without justice there can be no love or peace. And there is no escape from justice. Or, as Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, the arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends toward justice.
