I'm Still Here

This is a historiographic exercise hidden beneath the garb of a film. It performs one of the central tasks of historical inquiry: rejecting the idea that history is a neat, linear trajectory of events and insisting that it is, instead, a looping interval in which the past shapes the contours and textures of the present (aka, Foucault and "genealogy"). Simply "forgetting" the past through strategic amnesia fails to acknowledge that the past can manifest in the present in myriad ways. It emerges in photographs, artifacts, and habits that were postulated against historical events and persist into the present. In Bangladesh today, for instance, things like stunted populations, higher prevalence of autoimmune disorders, and even certain behaviors and social customs are shaped in part by generations of colonial domination, famine, and political persecution.

It's surreal to think about how I am just one generation away from when people who share my face, my habits, and my language, instead of sitting in the halls of UT Austin writing letterboxd reviews, were living under a form of subordination that tried to extinguish the way of life that we somewhat shared. There's something uncanny in recognizing that I might belong to one of the first generations of Bangladeshis to live even slightly outside the shadow of colonial rule, Partition, and genocide, all of which ended a little less than a lifetime ago. This film sharpened that awareness, and I commend it for revealing the stakes of what it means to live in a present shaped by histories I never experienced and only opaquely understand, yet whose remnants I still carry.

Most importantly, though, the film hit me hardest in how it implies, even with the weight of a colonial empire lodged in our bodies, we somehow keep going; when we're swimming in a beach or a pool and are on the precipice of drowning, we swing our head upward, take in a deep breath, and push forward, over and over again.