The word that keeps coming up for me these days is that old fleeting wind, that ancient disease, the morning sunflower... Nostalgia. I won't go on about that word here, there are many writings that can illuminate it for you (Edward Said, etc.), but this morning it creeped up on me as I read an article on Irani Cafes. And I realize now that perhaps I need a new word. What I felt was not nostalgia per se, but nostalgia for another's nostalgia, a nostalgia for a place I've never been, where my parents have never been, for a phenomenon I've never experienced. It is a doubly removed nostalgia, a secondary nostalgia, let's call it. Though of course, any nostalgia is for something elusive, for something that doesn't exist anymore, but now I really now that my nostalgia is not built from experience but from books, articles, etc.
https://munchies.vice.com/en_uk/article/yw4vnx/inside-karachis-disappearing-irani-cafes
Often, our greatest nostalgia is connected to place. Perhaps this is why the term keeps coming up in diaspora studies, the research of communities forced to split and move away from their homelands. This vice article on Irani cafes brought up a slew of nostalgia for me, yearning for the cafe that I do not know if it ever existed. Right now, as I am sick at home, my cafe is more like a slice of lemon in an old mug, the honey not quite mixed in with the now lukewarm water, half-used kleenexes scattered around.
I imagine the Irani cafes of Karachi, bustling with a fractured community of "student activists, journalists, and self-proclaimed Marxists," a community of which I imagine myself to be a part. I imagine that if I go to these cafes, I'll get embroiled in a discussion on Graham Greene's Quiet American, reflecting on colonialism, loneliness and a semi-noble past. But as I sit there talking about the loneliness of Greene's character, I will not feel lonely myself. I'll be surrounded by the people I imagine as those perfectly complementary minds: close enough to come to agreement but different enough to provide a challenging conversation. In the corner there will be a writer, half-oblivious to a conversation, typing up a novel taht in fifty years people like us will discuss in cafes again. The one thing I don't imagine is the actual coffee being served. That is no longer important in my fantasy.
Then I imagine a cafe from even longer ago. It's some kind of Ottoman-Arab cafe, serving qahwa full of cardamom. The coffee is re-entering my mind. But now it dissolves into a vapour, a smell in the background as a figure appears in the corner, sitting cross legged with flowing fabric covering his body and a turban on his head. He tells one of the stories from the 1001 Nights, أَلْف لَيْلَة وَلَيْلَة, unedited, a living story that has been cemented in ink onto paper. This is the oral tradition, the living tradition of storytelling that we don't value anymore, that seems to be reduced to anecdotal accounts of annoying neighbours and frightening mothers-in-law. My invented memory is a vivid painting, steam wafting from a dark red and orange landscape of chattering figures.
And my real cafe doesn't look like that anymore. I go to a cafe and I am alone. The only person I chat with is the barista. I struggle to find a seat, avoiding the frightening possibility of - God forbid - awkwardly having to ask a stranger if I can share a table. We are afraid of the unknown, and we rarely get the courage to chat with the familiar faces we see each day. I am surrounded, and yet I am utterly alone.
Further readings:
Scheherazade Goes West by Fatemah MernissiMernissiMernissi
The Scatter Here is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer
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