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Rituals of connection, reflections of celebration

I started this blog with the intention of writing about Finland for the benefit of everyone back home. For the first year, this goal made sense, there was plenty to learn about Finland and plenty of experiences as I explored the new country I was temporarily in.

Now though I am back here but with a very different mindset because this time, it's not just an adventure but about creating a space and a community for myself. This has changed quite a bit how I look at Finland. It also has changed how I see this blog. For the past two years I wasn't quite sure what to do with it but now I have a purpose.

My work has shifted to thinking about immigrant families. I've been immersed in theory on immigrant identities, practices, memories, culture. The articles I have been reading have been from the perspective of parents, teachers and children or from non-human perspectives like policies, depictions in the media or the language used to talk about immigrants.

So when I moved to Finland, got married and started making this place home, I started to realize what it meant to have to construct my own home and practices. Two holidays this past month  that I have very different relationships with in particular made me realize how much thought has to go into this. I'm hoping here to think about what it means to be an immigrant and the decisions that we make in our family and social lives and use the research to connect back to it.

I know academic research isn't necessarily something that interests most people. It's dry, and often needlessly complicated. But research gives me the advantage of the experiences of other immigrants and through theory, I can see how those experiences weave and bump up against my own experiences.I will try to avoid too many academic citations and figure out how exactly I want to include them as time goes on.

The first was Diwali, a holiday that I was not thinking much about since I have spent so many years largely accepting that Diwali could no longer be what it had been for me as a child. I was no longer surrounded by Aunties who I have known since I was a child. I could not eat the sweets my mom makes every year that we watch gather slowly in the dining room but cannot touch until after we have done our family puja on Diwali. And I could not do puja, at least not in the same way that we did, with my mother reciting scripture and then doing aarti together. This isn't uncommon, rituals are uniquely designed to help us remember and connect the past to the present (Connerton, 1989)

This changed though as the day came closer. My husband had already made plans and was going to be gone all evening. Suddenly, I felt a pang of longing thinking of the day passing by without any acknowledgement of how special it was. And I also felt overwhelmed and sad that carrying the weight of the holiday would be entirely up to me since we could not celebrate with any other Indians.

We ended up doing a small puja at home in the morning. I wanted to include my husband in this. We prayed, offered prashad of fruit and dried nuts and did aarti. I had to hold back tears because it was the first time in my life that I sang the bhajan used for aarti on my own. I had to look up the words on Wikipedia because I usually rely on other Aunties to remind me of the next verse.

It's this weight and emotions I felt around celebrating a holiday that I have been thinking about. I thought that celebrating holidays was important, but one that I could relatively easily detach from. It turned out that neither was the case. Celebrating is important because it ties us to who we are. It didn't feel as important when I was already surrounded by people who helped me remember who I am, but now that I am in a new country, far from any of those anchors, the celebration gained a new importance. 

There are articles on how some immigrant groups use similar ritual or cultural artifacts to connect back to the places, people and by extension, identities that they left behind (you can look at the end for two of these). The connections that these things offer are different for first generation immigrants (the generation that moved to the country) and second generation immigrants (the generation who was born in the new country). For the first generation, the connection is about remembering their own memories of home--the places they loves, the language they speak, the foods they ate--you get the idea. For second generation, sometimes these things are connecting them to memories that they don't even have themselves. The memories of the first generation become, in some sense, the memories of the second through the rituals and artifacts that they hold onto.

I am in a weird place because I am a second generation immigrant who has now immigrated myself. My Diwali puja was to connect me to a people who I know but also don't know. I think it was important to me mostly to connect me back to my own family, not as much the family in India (though that is part of it. My aunt was overjoyed that I did a puja and wore a silwar kameez for it) but the family in Illinois. I felt closer to them in some way when doing the puja, and felt almost like I could imagine my mom next to me while we did the aarti and bowed in the Indian way in front of of little altar. 

There were differences, of course. Since I can't read Sanskrit well enough or know whole portions of any scripture, I played one on YouTube, choosing it based entirely on my own fondness for its meaning and sound rather than any direct connection to Diwali. Our prashad was a pear that I cut up quickly before because I didn't have time to make even a simple halwa before the puja. But for me, the fact that I tried anything to replace these customs was enough to buoy me through and feel some connection. Some connection is better than none, after all.

By contrast, the other holiday that spontaneously became something we celebrated this year was Thanksgiving, a holiday that always had a nebulous meaning in my house. We never had set traditions or rituals that I remember or feel a deep connection to except teasing my dad about his excitement about Black Friday shopping (I think he likes the idea of it, not necessarily the shopping itself). Thanksgiving also has reliably been a time when my family gets together since my dad's birthday falls around it most years, with my brother and I using the time off as a reason to go celebrate with him. So with the spirit of family, I invited my husband's family over.

Maybe it's because our holiday celebration is so specific to my own family though that it didn't feel the same celebrating with a different family. What Thanksgiving means to them is based on what they've heard from movies and the trickle of American media that makes its way around the world. My family never connected to that narrative, Thanksgiving was more about my dad's birthday and the spirit of gratitude that we could all be together. So instead of feeling that the hours planning the meal, grocery shopping, cooking and eating were helping me connect to those rituals, they only heightened the lack of my own family surrounding me. Instead of feeling connected and grateful, I felt alone and homesick.

These reflections have made me consider the holidays more now, whether they are Indian, American or Finnish. I don't feel as cavalier about them or take the ways that we celebrate them for granted. It's making holidays a bit more stressful but I think putting in the thought of what they mean and how to honor that meaning is important as we start building our life together. These meanings and celebrations might change, especially as our family also changes in size and shape, but we will have at least a foundation for them so that they can be ways to connect, love and celebrate joy.


How societies remember by Paul Connerton (1989)

 

There's lot of other interesting books exploring memory. Here are two:

The invention of tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983)

Remembrance of Repasts by David Sutton (2001)

 

And some articles that talk about first and second generation immigrant practices

Klein, E. (2005). Maltese Australian ghana performance and debates of home. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(1–2), 57–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860500074011

Feldman, C., Bai, Y., Keys, K., & Schules, D. (2019). Negotiating trans-ethno space: An inductive investigation of kimchi’s ability to bound Korean-American transnational identity. Appetite, 136(December 2018), 18–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2019.01.007

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