Inspired, in part, by Nels' recent "Bricolage" homage to his friend Dave Conz, we are blessed with the following guest post today from Dr. Lopa Basu, Director of the Honors College and English Professor at UW-Stout.
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Memories
of a Mama: Joydeb Mukherjee
In Bengali, the term for a maternal uncle is Mama,
phonetically a repetition of Ma the word for mother. From our earliest nursery rhymes, the
intimacy of the place of a maternal uncle’s home is invoked:
Tai Tai Tai
Mamar bari jai
Mamar bari bhari moja
Doi Sandesh Khai
My rough translation:
Clap Clap Clap
We go to our Mama’s house
Mama’s house is a place of great joy
There we eat
curds and sweets !
The place of
the Mama and his home is a place of freedom, a suspension of the rules and
disciplines of everyday school and home life, a place of uninhibited
imagination and play. Today, as I write this, I remember that Mamar Bari and
the Mama who had such a formative influence in my childhood and with whose
death, that figurative place has ceased to exist. As long as my Mama lived, my
childhood was still available to me. Today, I feel the burden of adulthood and
the inability to escape into another world of imagination and play.
