Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"It heartened her to see her friend happy and fat."

"Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world."

-_- :O

“The Declaration [United States Declaration of Independence] is like a map. You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.”

"People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident."

"She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night."

"Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal."

"Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest."

"Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others."

"People wore different kinds of chains across their lifetimes, but it wasn’t hard to interpret rebellion, even when the rebels wore costumes to deny blame."

Cora didn’t know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

"one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality."

বছর খানেক আগে বইটির প্রাথমিক সম্পাদনার কাজ করেছিলাম, এরপর সে প্রতিষ্ঠান ছেড়েছি। বইটিও ঘটনাক্রমে সে প্রতিষ্ঠান ছেড়েছে। অন্য প্রতিষ্ঠান থেকে প্রকাশিত হয়েছে তবুও একখানা সৌজন্য কপি হাতে পেয়েছি। এই বইটিতে মুক্তিযুদ্ধের এমন কিছু কথা আছে যা আর কোথাও নেই, গেরিলাদের ও নির্যাতিত মানুষের মুখ থেকে হাসান মোর্শেদ ছাড়া যে কথা এর আগে আর কেউ জানতে চায়নি

There was a thunderous greeting from the crowd; it was a “HELLO” so enormous I could climb inside. And I did. Tears stung my eyes. Corin started the first notes of “Price Tag,” the opening track on the new album. Two bars later, Janet and I came in. I was in my body, joyous and unafraid. I was home.

I also, for once, felt a part of something. The inexplicable is its own form of freedom. Belonging is not a form of restriction. We can’t name the feeling but we can sing along.

Singularities had always been foreign to me, and where and who I came from was rife with dualities, a mesh of conflicted and diluted selves attempting to cohere, failing on account of an inarticulate denial. Fortunately, music granted me both an allowance of and a continual engagement with the ineffable.

It was the first time I felt I could be vulnerable in my creativity in which the emotional and psychic stakes were neither futile nor self-annihilating. That unlit firecracker I carried around inside me in my youth, eager to ignite it at the slightest provocation, to detonate my whole being and fill the room in a glowing spectacle, found a home in music.

a woman in her thirties, living alone, jobless and aimless, with animals to fill the space and to patch the holes.

There were four of them now, two cats and two dogs, one for each of my limbs; enough of them so that I could evenly disperse my worries and obsessions among them, worries that would have been too much for just one of them to bear.

All we ever wanted was just to play songs and shows that mattered to people, that mattered to us. Music that summed up the messiness of life, that mitigated that nagging fear of hopelessness, loneliness, and death. That night, we played for a roomful of the people who understood that very thing. Once again, I felt privileged, lucky.

You start in a tiny room and you end in one, too. Just me and Corin and Janet and a decade of songs between us. We had played those songs for thousands upon thousands of people, but now, as at the beginning, we would play them for only each other.

Halfway through the set I realized that no one could tell. That the difference between half-dead and distraught and fully living could potentially go undetected.

distance, I realized my yearning had little to do with place and more with the fact that I continually made a ritual of emptiness. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I would always feel a certain deficit. Like before, as a way to fill the hole, I began writing songs. Music began to restore me again.

Being predictable is boring, and it’s also disheartening and uninspiring. We needed a sense of rediscovery, for the audience and for ourselves.

We had to find intrinsic value in what we were doing, to not rely on the audience to compensate for any of our own lack of energy or drive or desire.
...
And in deconstructing our own songs, we found that we were building something anew: a trust in what we were as a band and what we could still become.

This was us having “made it!” We never stopped working. Most bands don’t.
...
arrived. I don’t understand how someone would not push, challenge, or at least be present, how anyone could get onstage and not give everything.

treason. The Dixie Chicks’ relatively mild comment admonishing George Bush while performing overseas would soon ignite vitriol, boycotts, and even death threats.
...
We wanted to be a sonic call to action, anthemic, to either join in or get out, to be shaken from indifference—not only the listeners but ourselves.

I never wanted to feel ashamed for striving, for desiring, for ambition. And I never wanted to judge another woman, or anyone, for that matter, for their own aspirations, even if they differed from my own.
...
A city’s scope could be measured then not by the number of good restaurants, coffee shops, and dog daycares but by the quantity of problems it had. Its realness could be quantified by its deficits.

Everyone gets to write a headline, and when you or the thing you do is being talked about, you get to feel like a headline—an addicting feeling for sure, but also a pernicious one. The discourse builds its own body, and it’s usually a monster.

The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. We were considered a female band before we became merely a band; I was a female guitarist and Janet was a female drummer for years before we were simply considered a guitarist and a drummer.

separate who we were from what we made. And each time I wanted things to be transcendent, to disregard gender dynamics or sexism, those things reared their ugly heads. It’s hard to divorce yourself from that conversation.