ROBI: the reason and the making

There’s a risk in writing that causes fear within immigrant communities. So much of the journey for immigrant families is the struggle of assimilation, a struggle to belong to a place that may not want you. Communities are built from this foundation of struggle, and the common ground of what home once was is sometimes the only glue holding these communities together. Any other struggle brought to the surface is the possibility of melting that glue.

Writing, at its most honest, is a sledgehammer to the comfortable. It’s a quiet fight against the status quo. It is bringing to the surface a minefield of hidden trauma, uncomfortable secrets, and frightening vulnerability — but with that, it also spurs a collective sigh of relief that we are not alone in our struggles.

Similar to most minority communities in the West, the immigrants and their children of the Bangladeshi diaspora have been afraid to face their demons publicly because presenting a perfect, hospitable, model minority community has always been a part of survival: pushing our crafts, our food, and our colorful clothes from the homeland to the front lines of this battle, hoping they shield us from persecution and prejudice. But we are human. We are a people with generational trauma that we are not allowing ourselves to deal with: we have been colonized, murdered, and raped. War had been waged against our bodies and our language and we won. We built ourselves from the rubble up. We are struggling but we are growing in the process. We have written songs and erected monuments to memorialize our bloodshed. We moved across an ocean so our children will never have to know what it is like being born from rubble. We still call ourselves freedom fighters. We brought over the best parts of our tradition and culture to keep our motherland alive in our new home.

Beautiful as our culture is, we also brought over the internalized racism from when we were colonized, the patriarchal oppression of our mothers and sisters, and the expectation that saving face in front of our community is more important than working together to better our community.

…And as children of all that, it’s our job to find a way to do better.

….And from our small corners of the planet we do that with this platform, our voices, and our actions.

For those of you who don’t understand Bangla, ROBI means sunlight. We, the Bangladeshi Identity Project team, asked Bangladeshis living in the West to show us their light — and they did. They sent us confessions of the heart hidden from spaces that do not talk about personal or sexual relationships. They sent us stories of abuse and trauma hidden from spaces that refuse to acknowledge the existence of abuse and trauma. They sent us photographs of home, wherever that may be. ROBI became so much more than we could have hoped. We wanted to give our community a platform to tell their stories, and in turn we got a small victory in this struggle against our own dishonesty.

Fahad Chowdury wrote about his first day in Canada:

“Abbu had meticulously tagged the luggage from numbers 1–10. He was always organized and we line up ourselves and our assigned luggage pieces beside him.

Is he excited? Or scared?

He had been taking French classes in the months preceding our migration.

Je suis etudiant, he would exclaim.

But he isn’t anymore. He is an immigrant, with a wife and 4 children aged 15 to 4.”

Bushra Mollick honored us with the heart-splitting story of her father in “My Father — The Creepy Uncle”:

“Once we were walking upstairs from the 74th Street-Roosevelt Avenue train station when she [mother] said something that bothered him, and he turned around and punched her in the nose.”

Poetry came to us from all over the world. In The Birthright, by Nadira Chowdhury, she brings to us contemplation we have all felt:

“The double life

Keeps the stakes high

But with the pedestal my parents are on

Is it worth the good fight”

This was our first journal of poetry, prose, and photography for and by the children Bangladeshi diaspora. We hope to make this happen annually, and each year we hope more voices find the courage to come out of the woodwork and risk a little more from their quiet corners of the planet.

ROBI became so much more than we could have hoped. We wanted to give our community a platform to tell their stories, and in turn we got a small victory in this struggle against our own dishonesty.

Thank you for showing us your light.