Exploring Nostalgia as a Methodological Tool to Study Populism

In my recent study of Talal Asad's insights, I stumbled upon a fascinating observation regarding the Romantic era and its impact on people's perception of the past. Asad highlighted how individuals interpreting literature during that period developed a distinct nostalgia for a bygone era, fostering a sense of disenchantment with their present reality. This sentiment often glorified certain aspects of the past, birthing the notion of revivalism.

Reflecting on Asad's thoughts about the Romantic era led me to hypothesize a crucial link between nostalgia and the surge of populism. In today's urban societies, shaped by modernization, experiences of conflict, terrorism, state-sponsored violence, and upheaval have created a yearning for a perceived 'better' past. This sentiment, pervasive in conversations I've had in Bangladesh and with some individuals in Downtown New York, manifests as a belief that the past was superior while an unending decline mars the present and future.

This narrative serves as fertile ground for the emergence of revivalist politics. The rapid pace of change in their familiar world, lacking stability, fuels a longing for a time perceived as more secure and comforting. This sentiment echoes in slogans like "Make America Great Again," which resonates not merely as a simplistic phrase but as a symbolic appeal to a traditional, legendary construct—a time of perceived stability.

The populace, fatigued by the repetitive rhetoric of the global war on terrorism, seeks a savior from the chaos. Simplified expressions of anger, humor, and sorrow find resonance among those uninterested in the eloquent yet complex rhetoric of liberal politicians. The straightforward language of the populace aligns with their mythic, legendary ideals, shaping their outlook on daily life and politics.

This longing for a past itself is not the making of nostalgia alone but a feeling that the world has lost its glory. This feeling about the past is the making of the narrative, remembrance and longing about the past expressed in the retelling of narratives about the mythic and legendary, thus shaping the repertoire of nostalgia. Their thoughts are highly influenced by the rhetoric used in the mythic stories and hence, nostalgia itself is a socio-religious and cultural construct.

Methodology in Understanding Societal Dynamics of Nostalgia

Asad's critique of ethnography as synonymous with anthropology raises pertinent questions about the broader scope of anthropology beyond ethnography alone. However, I diverge from Asad's view that labels ethnography as a pseudo-scientific method. The effectiveness of ethnography hinges on how one defines and distinguishes it within anthropology. Margaret Mead's subjective interpretation of Samoan people's coming of age does lend credence to Asad's argument. In my research, immersion in the social sphere has been crucial. It's through living within and understanding a community that I've gleaned insights into their culture and dynamics.

How can I collect data about nostalgia? Keeping in mind the criticism of ethnography by Talal Asad and also the criticism of Margaret Mead, it is important to also draw on research conducted by researchers who did not employ ethnographic research. When it comes to sourcing research data, the approach of scholars like Ali Riaz, who built theories based on secondary data and reports, does possess merit. Yet, Riaz's conclusions about the rise of radical Islam could have been enriched by firsthand participant observation among the Bangladeshi diaspora. My experiences within this community have revealed a complex narrative—where mosque construction abroad reflects not just religious fervor but also a demonstration of social status.

Maintaining unbiased fieldwork, building rapport, and employing ethnography yield valuable, real-time data. However, it's crucial to remain open to evolving conclusions based on findings. Mead sought solutions in Samoa for American youth problems, while Riaz's preconceived notions about Islamic terrorism and Wahhabism colored his interpretations. This underscores the importance of addressing biases in research.

Ethnography, despite its potential for bias and misrepresentation, remains an indispensable tool. It allows researchers to engage authentically with human subjects in their evolving cultural and historical context, capturing the nuances necessary for comprehensive analysis. Ethnography recognizes the humanity within the research subjects, acknowledging their changing realities and everyday experiences.

Therefore, broadly understanding the nostalgia of how people see the past and why they connect with Donald Trump would be an important aspect of the research I am building on. This would certainly refer to the idea of articulation outside the modernist-liberalist worldview and, hence, once again making folklore and ethnography an important arsenal for the research; although the discipline underwent and is undergoing existential question these days based on the question of decolonization, plurality and overall with the crisis marked by both tendencies of decolonization and pluralization.

Note on Poetry and Oral Narratives

Rasel Raju 

12.17.2023

Modern poetry has a prestigious role in how it surprises the normal perception by extending metaphorical extension to such abstract notions to create a specific sort of perception, shuddering a genuine reader to delight. This notion is essential, and it is also purely ingenious that a poet plays with word to make a dignified reader travel word by word, rhythm by rhythm, image by image, and conceit by conceit to perceive the metaphoric extension and feel delighted by that revelation through the metaphoric extension. The understanding of poetry itself thus has prestige as it is said to be a distinguished form of artistic craftsmanship that requires a particular reader to perceive the artistry word by word and travel along the poem to the metaphoric extension, thus allowing that construct that rhetoric to animate him with that particular notion. As a poet myself, I always subconsciously longed for and constructed metaphors that transcended sensual perception. As I write this, I have come up with a metaphor: "My life is inside me in meditation," or the other one that I wrote some time ago,

For ages have I been longing in the shore of this material life,

who shall take me to the other side?

I kept on cherishing, but, alas! I cannot dip in the river of love!

These metaphors are composed of metaphorically extending the material reality to the immaterial. The abstract feeling beyond language that one feels resonates at the moment of joy, of sorrow, of delight, of sadness, of nostalgia. This extends beyond how one perceives of things using one's senses and instead goes on to demonstrate how one feels inside. Poetry itself thus stands out in its most surprising form. Equally so, this form garners a feeling of pity but without any material reason behind it.

However, modern poetry, except mystic, Sufi, and baul poetry, is relatively secular in its form. This does not, however, mean that poetry is perceived in its modern form by everyone. And the very perception of a true reader, a genuine reader, is somehow a literate construct. Poetry is, as Borges mentioned in his lecture on The Riddle of Poetry, like a book; its taste does not lie in the fact that it is perceived as such but in the moment of a reader reading it otherwise, the poem is dead, and thus a reader enlivens the poetry of the written words.

But is that just genius that creates such metaphors? It would take much work to answer this question. But the relation of conquest, imagination, and wonders surrounding everyday life itself is the core which muses the poetic, the genius of humans to construct a relation, a connection that transcends the material and takes the human to the realm of joy, curiosity, sorrow, sadness, nostalgia, to the other world that is beyond language and beyond expression. This is where the transformation takes place and a modern reader while Li Po feels amazed as he reads,

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly,

And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking.

Which was the real—the butterfly or the man?

This notion of real by a poet hundreds of years ago surprises a modern reader because it pauses in him a notion of reality, a transitory moment where he lingers between the real and the other realm that language can't express. 

But when it comes from everyday life and says,

The moon's visible mark has a treelike shape and is home to Ajrail, the angel of death. The treelike shape is a banyan tree underneath which dwells the angel of death, and in its leaves are inscribed the names of each man and woman on earth. As soon as a leaf falls off, the person's name engraved on it dies. Because Ajrail picks up the leaf, reads the name on it, takes away the soul, and hands it before Allah. A new child is born when a new leaf buds in the banyan tree.

The metaphoric extension above connects the moon with the idea of a banyan tree and the notion of death as part of the other world. This triangular construct involves an explanation of what the moon is and what death and life are, besides locating the world of language that creates the bond. It does not seem so surprising and rather constitutes a form of reason that modernity frowns as ignorance and lack of reasoning. However, thinking about the moon and its gray marks from the world and coming up with the idea of a banyan tree, Ajrail, and life and death constitutes a communication surrounding both the world of language and senses and the world beyond language that feels, fears, and wonders about what lies in death and why are people born. If Li Po's poem asking about reality is ingenious, why isn't the construction of the narrative regarding the moon and its marks ingenious?

This is where the modern poetry and its readership come into question. Modern poetry and those of the ancient poets' readers celebrate come into notice because the contact a reader makes is made consciously that he is reading a poem, a collection of poems in book-length form, or a single poem shared in notes and/or scribbles in its commonly acknowledged form. In that sense, naming poetry as poetry itself does the trick and creates its appreciation and its patron. On the other hand, the rhetoric, the conceit, the metaphor that lie within the concept of the moon as the dwelling place of the angel of death does not mark its imprint as such because this is an everyday thing. It does not require one to sit down and read it in a textual form or recitational form recorded as audio by a professional reciter.

In this sense, poetry itself as a form or a structure somehow prevented modern readers from perceiving the poetry of everyday life, especially in religious and belief narratives. This has surmounted to an end of circulation of these constructs and, as such, among the literate tradition bearers who boast about progress and evolution and label the dying tradition as ignorance, unreason, and superstition created by the darkness of time, of a medieval barbaric era. But who could tell how precious those rhetoric, metaphor, conceit, imagination, and their extension to the world beyond language were?

Beat-less And Dead

Had I this touch on my palms
Shivering with a joy never felt before,
Had I this love in my heart
Filled with tomorrow, and a life
Then alone I could rest my heart
Beat-less and dead almost!
Here I sit and sob alone with a string
Attached to heart tuning melody,
Bear witness, oh! bear witness now
And this, my darling, to you I bring
My brain's pain, I ain't live
I ain't belong, I ain't exist!
But, oh! I wish! Had I this touch
Imprinted on me, you would sure see
Death could have been my enemy!

MOLLY

IT KEPT on going like this for several years. And then there came the change. A very old lady was passing by the garden at the centre of the little town, she was thinking about being young again. That was the bravest moment of one’s life and it felt awkward for her to think of girlhood as she found it impossible to get back to where she had once been. When she reached home, it was dark outside and she, for a long time had fabricated herself into a chain, went to bed much earlier at daybreak. She did that routinely and stepped in her little bed a little while after she had reached home. She was used to eat nothing for dinner. So, she discreetly fell asleep almost after getting off to bed.

When she woke up, there was utter silence out there. She feared silence a lot. But now more than normalcy, she grew curious. She looked around and found it dark out there. She grew agitated at the sight of darkness, blushed and then worried as if someone might overhear her sweet little insanities. Finding herself secured, locked up and distant from everyone else, she put on her eye-glass and felt deadly silence everywhere. She grew afraid and out of curiosity tore off that fear from mind, denying the old-age trait quite bravely. The room she lived in had no mirror, no window; the only exception was a ventilator which was built not for the old lady’s sake but to keep the temperature more balanced and amicable. A bed, a rocking chair and a very old-cracking door were the heirloom possessions of that room. But at times a sparrow used to sneak in her room to which she used to talk without fainting out of fear. The arrival of the sparrow was a lot more or so unexpected. When she felt like talking to it, the sparrow didn’t show up. But when she cherished to keep apart from every living creature and got furious enough to thresh the flies, cockroaches and the ants that regularly strolled on the floor in search of leftover corns, the sparrow showed up. She, using all her forces and capacities, tried to grab the little creature and thresh it, too. She had failed for several times, so she grudged the little bird and ran after it and cursed it. The sparrow, too, perhaps responded to that by marvelous chirping and at one point by flying out through the ventilator leaving her nuts. She, once more, got lonesome and loved to hymn whatever songs she had learnt once and fragments of which had been stored in her numbskull.

She had a son living in that very apartment, happily married and busy with his own school of adults. He cared for anything but the old lady and remained gaily happy with what he had believed of his own; age. But the old lady found age almost a marvelous wound; being old meant angry and annoyed, palsy and feeble, lacking any physical charm. Her world was solitude and silence. She feared them both. Actually she was scared of being old, lonesome with nobody to talk with. Astoundingly, she wasn’t fond of having friends either. From the very beginning of her old age still now, she cherished the dream of being young again.

The urge she felt was years old and it was to look her reflection in the mirror. She, at first, grew ashy and surprised. Age took all the charms she had had once and now all she had were bones and crumpled skin. She lived her life for so long a time that had she known to keep account of that, it might very well have crossed four score. But luckily she wasn’t an academician and was aware about nothing of aging. So, she couldn’t say no to the urges and in search of a mirror, she blindly walked out of her room scrawling down touching her bed, floor and the wall where the switch of the light existed. But she failed to locate it.

She knew the feelings very well. That’s what made her happy, curious and fond of proving her assumptions right. Had she been proven wrong, had it all been a mirage; would her instinct lie to her? She felt stronger and fresh, better than ever, she took off her glass and rid her of the stick. She glanced at the door. A shimmering light was visible from a little distance which she took for the door. Right she was and thus believed with joy that she had just stepped out of her little wreckage.

Everyone called her Molly when she was young and she was beautiful. So beautiful that her most important task was to stand in front of the mirror, look at herself and comb her hair. She blushed at the sight of herself, felt proud and hymned love songs celebrating her beauty. She did it with lots of care and affection, took a lot of time in garnishing herself. She put on her favorite necklace, earrings and bangles, all with deep love and considerations. She was terribly in love with herself. That got into her blood so deeply that in those years of her life not even a single day had passed when she didn’t stare at herself through the mirror and got amazed. What she didn’t like to do was to put on red dress. The common prejudice she had was that. She neither liked to walk outdoor for she feared losing her charms nor she liked to make love with man which would take away her virginity. She stayed at home for so long a time that people upon hearing her fame, especially those young bachelors, crowded her window with curious and lustrous eyes. They wanted to charm her like this, each one of them. But she didn’t show up and showed no interest in them. Eventually she grew scared, wearied at this and her parents tried amusing her with words which failed to calm her down. People got the news of her beauty and wanted to have a glance at her at any cost. She became a miracle overnight with men proposing her in so many weird ways that she secretly started enjoying that.

That mystery made her the talk of the town both in good and bad ways. Gradually it reached her ear, shaking off the glooms she grew happier and thus kept on taking care of her physical charms which she believed to be the core of her life and thus forgot her scared situation. But suddenly a very rich man visited her family. She, too, co-incidentally was undergoing a crisis situation. Her parents failed to bear her expenses and she grew miserable. She was worried of losing her beauty, charms that kept on amazing her for so many days, months and years which she didn’t know to count down. She almost committed suicide unless the rich man had shown up. He thus became a savior and earned respect from both Molly and her parents.

The whole town got shocked when Molly left the town forever with that rich man and might never show up again. What was miserable about her was that she knew her world too well and thus the new world turned hostile towards her, she never had been in need to adopt and thus turned peevish, grumpy and silent. Yet she had the mirror to look at, to comb, and then to love herself. Thus time went by. She had three kids by that rich man whom she didn’t seem to believe to be her own kid. The rich man loved her blindly, so he took care of the kids and allowed her freedom to take care of her beauty and also provided her with what she loved most; solitude. She regained her happiness gradually and then one day suddenly the rich man died.

She remembered everything quite well. She was happy after all. She left her in-laws and settled once again in her parents’ apartment. She had no sibling which turned out to be a great deal of fortune. But there had been a rumor about her, almost apt to truth. Nobody blamed her anyway. She, therefore, spent her life in great joys and her parents took all the responsibilities of her kids.

But a terrible thing occurred once in an evening. Her eldest offspring, a baby-boy of five then, knew his mother. He called her from behind the door. “Mom, I want to sleep with you.” That was shocking for her. She couldn’t just share her solitude with someone else.

She, then, failed to recollect the rest of that incident. “Was that terrible? … What was that I was thinking about?”  But despite of being agitated, she felt like aroused. “Is that nausea or a trauma, or a dream?” she asked herself. All her life she had been scapegoat to time. And now, it came to an end! “Ridiculous!” she shouted, “It must be a mirage! But I can see through the corridor. Had I not grown younger, it mustn’t have happened. Time can’t wind backward. That’s crazy.” She blushed once again.

She, now, knew what to do but wasn’t actually aware of where the mirror might have been. Her son Robin just forced her out of the room when her parents died. They died like a flying bird dispreading its wings. Robin was married then and his wife needed the mirror just like Molly. So, he shifted Molly out of her room and compelled her into that tiny little room. At first she felt like shaken at this, but time was a marvelous wound which gave her plenty when it was her time and now it started to retake what it had provided once.

Being marveled at what was happening, she stood stunningly for a long time just to accept it. She chided her lips for being dried up, rotten and surprisingly felt her teeth once again those were long gone, she wanted to feel her breasts, too, which she failed to do for being extraordinarily shy. She blushed followed by an awkward smile. She resisted herself from going down to the room at this hour of the night which she thought to be crazy. But the second thought that stormed through didn’t allow her that delay. She just needed a mirror to look at and thus would be able to make sure of the fact that she had grown young once more!

She felt shy, feeble to inner intrusion and thus had decided to wait no longer. Her son would never mind at her intrusion, he loved her a lot. If not, he’d respect her at least and never hurt her. She just step by step walked ahead and felt relieved, fresh and a lot more stronger. All she had to do was to have a sight at her in the mirror.

She entered the room, found the mirror which was clean and large, larger than she had been expecting. She felt happy as she finally managed to come across the mirror. She remembered her beauty box which she used for so many ages. She blushed once again and smiled, and then she laughed and continued doing so for a long period of time; she blushed, smiled and then laughed again and again. When she calmed herself down and tried having a glance at herself through the mirror, she failed. That was touchy, but she didn’t give up yet. So, she kept on trying and all the time she ended up without succeeding.

That was hard for her part to accept this, she still felt her teeth and angrily managed to touch her breast and somehow felt her nipples alive! That was a pitiful situation, she felt young and had the urge to carry on with the old habit; she needed to see herself in the mirror which she couldn’t!

When in the morning Robin’s eldest son got up and walked out to the corridor, he screamed like hell out of terror. Robin and his wife rushed out, afraid.

“What happened, son?”

“There’s a witch out there…” the boy stammered out of fear.

They looked through the corridor in the dimming morning light. There’s a fresh and cold breeze blowing. It felt unearthly when they heard an old voice murmuring which sounded like an alien language to them. They looked carefully and were afraid to step ahead lest it should be a witch.

Robin was the first person to identify Molly. She was fallen, weak and fatigued by the cold wintry wind. 

ম্যালাডি

১
সুসাম্প্রদায়িক দিন পেরুনো বিকেলে
কাঁঠাল গাছের ছায়া মেখে রোজ
কেন জানি কেঁপে কেঁপে উঠে
সবুজ পাতারা, মেটে কাণ্ড।
আমাদের গ্রাম ছোট এবং বৈদ্যুতিক
আছে অবারিত টিলা, সবুজ গাছের ছায়া
আছে মাঠ, একদল ছেলে
তবু নেই কোন শব্দময় কোলাহল
সন্ধ্যে হলে সবাই যে ফিরে যায় ঘরে!
ঘরে ঘরে নেই আর অতো গান
পুঁথিপাঠ সন্ধ্যা
উঠোনে বিছানো চাটাই
চাল ভাঁজা, চিঁড়ে আর ধানের খই
অঘ্রাণের বিকেলে মাড়াই
সকালে গোবরজলে লেপা সে উঠোন
খড়ের স্তূপ!

২
অগ্রসর জীবনের কোন টানে
কত চেনা পরিসর বদলায়
বদলায় সমস্ত দিনের শেষে
বাদুড়ের ওড়াওড়ি,
প্রবাস ফেরত চিঠি
বিদেশি লাগেজ
মায়ের দোয়া
বাবার শাসন!
তবু চিনাহাস, পোষা পাখি
বেতের কাজ
শীতল সে পাটি
মিশে আছে যেন এতকাল
এত যুগ ধরে।
৩
অগ্রসর ঘোড়া
পরাবে লাগাম
চায়ের বাগানে
মেটোরাস্তা জুড়ে
আজ আর নেই
কোন পদছাপ
পুরনো প্রেমিকা
সবুজ পতাকা
ছোট ছোট গ্রাম
কিছু নেই আর
কিছু নেই আর
তবু ত লিখেছি
এই গান, একা
হে আমার গ্রাম
ফিরে ফিরে দেখা!