Posted by There’s a section in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible that describes how one of the preacher’s daughters eventually fell for and married an African revolutionary; how she worked hard to support him and their causes in Zaire and Angola and other places so far removed from her native Georgia. I have in my mind’s eye, a pretty young white girl, living deep in the heart of Africa, working the soil in an Angolan agriculture station or striving, at various times, to free her husband from jail.
What sacrifices to familiarity did she make for the sake of revolutionary causes and for her husband. It gets me to thinking about the nature and fragility of friendship, of love and connection, and how people so often freely change their circumstances and thus the associations they had held all their lives.
My parents have almost no regular in-person contact with the people they knew growing up; their original core of friends, so to speak. The internet enables them to exchange emails and there are phone calls and increasingly video calls but that’s not the same. Neither parent has lived in Bangladesh since their 20’s.
Plus ça change…
My family’s immediate groups of friends in Pittsburgh are largely ex-pat Bangladeshis and Indians. These are the ones we see at dinner parties, the ones who shows up at important life events like kids’ birthdays, graduations, weddings and even funerals. It’s a relatively new group, one forged over the past 20+ years, which although not insignificant, is just a portion of a person’s life. Even then, it’s changed and renewed by the cycles of undergrad and grad school and people getting married and having kids and moving around for fellowships and jobs.
I’ve looked through my parents’ photo albums, of their childhoods and their early marital years. I don’t always know the people in those pictures, their importance to or influence upon my parents, nor how they have, in many cases, fallen by the wayside in my parents’ lives. To wit, if I move away from Pittsburgh or the USA, will persons C or I whom I hold so dearly eventually become the same as persons Z & B from my parents’ past? The converse also applies.
My mind now flashes to a different scene – this time to a young man leaving the village to go to Dhaka and Lahore, then to Baltimore and Pittsburgh, then living in Basra and Tripoli before getting married. And a young lady growing up in Dhaka and then coincidentally going to Lahore before getting married. They spend their first years together in Tripoli, then southern Nigeria before returning to Pittsburgh years later.
How different must he be now to make jokes about eating serpent in Iraq and she to make jokes about the challenge of eating goat’s head soup in Anambra State. How different must they seem to their childhood friends over email, skype or zoom.
“Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you’ll need the people you knew when you were young.” – Baz Luhrmann
Luhrmann’s statement accedes the point that our immediate circles of friends from childhood and early adulthood will not necessarily stay the same. In a mobile society, it’s unrealistic to expect to spend one’s life entirely in one locale. I’m happy here in Pittsburgh but would not declare that I expect never to leave this city. Even if living mostly in one locale, one’s immediate groups of friends are not guaranteed to stand still anyway.
There’s no certainly shame in such change and hopefully my tone doesn’t even convey sadness either. Humans are a social creature and so our connections must evolve as do we.
How about one more flash – lastly, an aspiring creative, leaving her hometown after college to chase the dream. Working multiple service jobs, sometimes barely making rent or affording a decent meal, going to audition after audition after audition. She lands roles, some small and some big. Along the way, there’s a boy and new friends. The boy falls away. Some of the friends move on. Love, heartache, breakups, another chance, another taken opportunity, another missed opportunity. Eventually she returns home, perhaps to stabilize for a while before heading back out or perhaps to let life catch up to her.
I suppose we never truly know our parents. I suppose we never truly know our latter-day friends. Everyone is subject to the whips and scorns of time, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of dispriz’d love, etc. I once made up an ‘improved’ version of hopscotch but I haven’t seen, in-person, the best friend who helped come up with the game since we moved from Nigeria in 1986. I think he’s doing well.
[Originally published: February 28, 2011. Rewritten: October 28, 2020]
