Memories: An Immigrant’s Crystal Ball
It might be trite to say but it is true that memories are the glue that holds our past together. Maybe even super glue. Without them the past is just fragments of moments lived and lost. It is funny to me when people say “let’s make memories.” How does one live everyday and not make memories? I don’t think a special time or day needs to be carved out to create them. Maybe I am being cynical.
Memories are really fascinating to me from a personal and academic perspective. I will leave the latter for my PhD thesis I never plan on finishing. As a society we choose to memorialize events and people in history through collective projects like monuments, the History Channel or biographies. It is often people in power that choose what gets remembered and what is forgotten. As Bob Marley sang in Get Up, Stand Up! “alf the story has never been told”
But what about individually? What do we as individuals choose to remember about our lives? For me as an immigrant some memories are inevitably lost because I left when I was young and a transatlantic flight makes us all forget things young or old. But active remembering in immigrant families is a daily ritual like stretching the muscles would be for a long distance runner.
However, what is interesting is the nature of that active remembering changes. It did at least in my family. My family and I used to sit around the dinner table occasionally and talk about “how far we have come.” While my parents were navigating the meaning of their experiences as foreigners in a land unknown to them, I was not only being challenged by the experience of moving but also the experiences of being a teenager in a new place. We did not know much about our new home, but we remembered a lot about the home we left behind in India. However, as time passed, our memories shifted to remembering our experiences as new immigrants rather than our experiences in India. And today, we hardly talk about India.
It is when we are with a group of Indians that we recollect memories of India and, in the process, edit each other’s stories of immigration. It is also far more comfortable for us to talk about India when we are with Tamilians, as language brings an intimacy. We talk about the Mysore Pak(sweet) we could get at the corner store in our neighborhood or the times when we were cheated by auto rickshaw drivers. When women gather around the kitchen we often wish we had more opportunities to wear our silk saris and our gold jewelry. This is certainly not unique to Indian immigrant communities. All of us do this in varying contexts. But for immigrant communities the need to remember maybe stronger because memories are a locus for identity formation in new environs.
Who I am today is a consequence of those places I have paused, stayed and lived at for a while. In those places deep meanings are inscribed and it is up to me to remember fiercely so that I can fully grasp the person I am today and understand where I am headed. Whether I like it or not, I am the product of those long gone days.
