Knots and Bubbles: on culture and those who play in its gaps

Who's playing Norman Fucking Rockwell next to Amburiq Mosque?!

Goddamn, manchild / You fucked me so good that I almost said I love you

— Lana Del Rey, “Norman Fucking Rockwell”

On this trip to Pakistan, d. and I had conjured a little inside joke in the form of the following:

“Wow, this is probably the first time Norman Fucking Rockwell has been played here!”

On the narrow dirt road to the 14th Century Amburiq Mosque, nestled in a friendly multigenerational village: Wow, this is probably the first time Norman Fucking Rockwell has been played here!

In the dust clouds of Karakoram Highway, as a dust storm bore on us from above, small skittering rocks scattering precipitously into the river far below: Wow, this is probably the first time NFR has been played here!

In the back streets of Islamabad, between guard towers where uniformed men slumped in the heat: Wow, bet no one has played this B-Side off Norman Fucking Rockwell here yet!

It was fun to sit in that thought, the two of us, queer compatriots in a country whose engine was made of traditional families, and the bloody loyalty that is made of them.

For my part, I had come to this country with a presumptive defensiveness, as friend after friend — usually of older generations — had expressed surprise that I was going to a place “so remote.” Pakistan wasn’t more remote than some other countries I had been to, at least geographically; rather — and this was something I only pieced together later — the political distance one felt, between the so-called West and the birthplace of many of its enemies, had been culturally projected onto geography. The “remoteness” my friends and family referred to wasn’t about the length of the plane flight. It was about ethics, religion, and way of life. Pakistan was the moral boonies.

My presumptive defensiveness against this was, admittedly, pretty Canadian. I was determined to find Pakistan not that different; and if it was different, I was determined to encounter that difference without judgement; and if I failed at even that, I was determined to balance out my judgement with an ill judgement of my place of origin, was if to say, “well, every place has its pros and cons.” I wanted to avoid, at all costs, encountering this place as though it were lesser than the Torontos and the Palo Altos I had come from.

Anyway, this soon became impossible.

I’m not about to say that Pakistan is indeed some sort of backwater. Nor am I to say that it’s somehow equivalent in every way to Canada. What I will say, though, is that every society in human history — nay, every reasonably sustainable arrangement of human beings — must overcome some basic challenges about being alive, together: how to distribute resources, how to get along, how to deal with conflict and how to enact justice… it is the different responses to these basic challenges that constitute different cultures, and every culture has its own knots to tie in its attempts to solve these issues. And I encountered on my trip some knots that had been resolved in ways that I found thorny, painful even.

For example, I had long wanted to visit d.’s mother on this trip. d. and I had been best friends in college, and we were coming up on nearly a decade of fierce friendship — which included almost half of that time as roommates in a cooperative living community we started together. During that time, even though we had never met in person or even video call, she often spoke highly of my soothing influence on d.’s life, and once even sent me a gorgeous Kashmiri shawl. We had never met face to face, but I felt her warmth as a real presence in my life, and by the time it was time to travel to Pakistan, I was ready to embrace her in person.

Well, culture had other plans. At first, this “knot” announced itself in d.’s nervousness. He announced over dinner one day, our hands absentmindedly working away at the bhindi masala, “Maybe I’ll say you’re my teacher. When I go back home.”

“Why can’t you just tell the truth?”

He looked at me with a mixture of pity and compassion, “Because. Men and women can’t just be friends here. It’s not like that. You’re either married, or you’re not even supposed to look at another man’s woman.”

He paused and then added, “They’d say, ‘d. and this foreign woman came over to the house…’”

d. was not married. This was a point of contention in his family, not just that he had not found himself a legible wife but that he had more or less vanished, gone off to the United States to do god-knows-what and fulfill none of the family expectations. He was 25, working on DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), these brief Drop City-like organizations that popped up on the web with customizable social rules and contracts, all built around the unimpeachable blockchain, and a shared cryptocurrency. Even for Silicon Valley, it was cutting-edge, it was niche. I hardly grasped it myself.

We went back and forth for a bit about the teacher plan, never settling on the ideal path forward, and then his mother called.

d.’s mother made herself very clear: it would not be possible to meet me in the house. Perhaps, she suggested, we could meet her somewhere outside the house, and she could conspicuously “go on a walk” or “go visit an aunt” and meet us at the mall or something. She emphasized that d.’s brother was soon to enter his exams, and any family drama would disrupt his studies, his frantic work in the delicate domestic bubble they had built for themselves.

This call was so laden with consequence that I suggested we not meet her at all. The idea that my insistence that we meet could somehow disrupt the balance of their lives, not just for a day but potentially for months or years, made me nauseous. It also felt patently unjust that the consequences of our meeting would be borne out by one side, by virtue of a culture they did not have the privilege to choose out of.

A few days passed with this — the non-meeting — as the plan. Eventually, though, d.’s mother’s spirit prevailed and she suggested we meet her after all, and we drove out of Islamabad into Azad Kashmir on a dusty windy day.

I did, eventually, get to meet d.’s mother. We picked her up at the mall, I called her d.’s aunt (in order to dupe the driver who was from the area) and we played the double charade of language and theatre in the backseat. Still, when she entered the car, the kiss and embrace she gave me were real, realer than anything.

We drove around until we found a remote-ish KFC and hid at one of the tables, eating chicken together and talking haltingly through d., who took on some measure of the son’s shyness as she fawned and tutted. Above us, the fan spun lazily, pushing the air around the spacious white interior. Every once in a while, behind me, the glass doors would swoosh open and a new couple or family would enter in a gust of heat.

d.’s mother cannot go for a walk around her neighbourhood without other family members making a conspicuous comment: Where are you going? The implication, of course, is that it is not proper for her to be out alone. She, like my parents, is nearing 60.

And while I did not experience the particular gridded realities of living in a family while in Pakistan, in various mountain regions, outside of the city, I wore a shawl to cover my chest, my back and butt. I played the demure, Chinese lady who was a respectful visitor, making as few ripples as possible, as goat herders did their best not to stare and clucked their tongues at their herds to head on home. I did this even in a historic heat wave, as some male companions bared their arms and spread their legs while sitting, laying claim both to public space and to the right to be comfortable.

It is not that women do not have power in Pakistan. It is rather that they wield power in a different realm, and I had no access to that realm while traveling, and all that my life had taught me about navigating cities, people, and public resources was useless in a space that saw me as belonging, fundamentally, elsewhere.

The only exception to this feeling were in the small bubbles I entered or made with others I had met, usually Americanized Pakistanis; in the miraculous Skardu “bunk house” constructed by N, an ex-Marine who had a dream of making AirBNBs in remote areas of the nation; in d. and I’s Islamabad guest house, where during the day we lazed about and typed away at our laptops, sitting cheerfully on the floor, as whole as we could muster; in the dunes of Skardu, where, surrounded by new friends who had all had the privilege of going abroad, I sank into the sand and stared at the stars and didn’t, for once, think of what I was wearing or how I seemed.

Culture is not a homogenous substance, it is more like a series of knots. These knots solve problems, and they also represent different distributions of work. Just as in a complex knotted system, different areas are under different tensions, so too in society do we distribute our labors and woes differently. In some cultures, caste is the name we give to how these labors are distributed; in others, it is gender, or race, or even just an unnamed something that insiders can feel, and respond to, and recreate. It need not be nameable to be a stratum in society; those who participate in the culture know it without needing to say it aloud.

But between these knots, too, are spaces: spaces where the opposite can flourish, where strange and miraculous spaces open for short periods of time, held open through hard work of a different kind. N made this kind of space for us, and for a few precious days I lay in bed reading, brazenly baring my shoulders, drinking hot chocolate and chai, and chatting loudly in English, sharing my opinions. d. and I made this space together, in the car, pretending to sit apart, but listening ever-so-intently to Lana Del Rey singing about her doomed sexual romance with a childish man while the driver drove on, probably wondering what this beautiful female voice was saying. These spaces rarely announce themselves. But when you find them, they are among the most precious things that a culture has to offer — and it is to the credit both of the culture and the creators of the bubbles that they endure.

I travelled to Pakistan sensing that d. had a kind of beef with it, so to speak. I had hoped, at the beginning of my trip, that my wide-eyed optimism might somehow reignite his hope for a functional life in the country of his birth, that somehow together we might find the right bubbles, or make our own. But I’m not sure you can build your life in a bubble. I’m not sure that the bubble, if that is all you have, is enough to feed you, and nourish you in creating good work. Ultimately, after hours of discussing this, in dust storms and in mountain valleys, on rock screes and in defunct national parks, we both somehow landed on the same idea: it was time for him to go.

Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news / But I can’t change that, and I can’t change your mood

— Lana Del Rey, “Norman Fucking Rockwell”

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