Nostalgia Fueling Melancholy

[humaira_abedin]

Melancholy seems to prolong an invisible and often private pain, which is what I picked up on from Nitin Sawhney's track "Nostalgia". Though the father expressed that he and his family are in a better situation than they were before, the state of "okayness", is one that is fundamental for survival. It is also the bare minimum ranking of feeling good after struggling and overcoming challenges. That is not to say that being okay also does not imply a certain degree of privilege, it can be but I think when talking about melancholic migrants, the privilege is often something to surrender to and something that must be taken without wanting anything more, especially in the context of a migrant moving to a western country. Listening to the track, I remembered Sara Ahmed speaking about the connections between imagination and melancholy and feelings of grief. She argues that "the loss of an abstraction borrows its certainty as loss by being imagined as a displacement of the loss of a beloved" (p. 140).
Similarly, nostalgia itself can be seen as a kind of "loss of an abstraction" because we often mourn not just people or places, but the intangible feelings or worlds that we associate with them. The sentence suggests that abstract, distant losses are emotionally anchored by imagining them in terms of more immediate, personal kinds of loss, ones that I find really hard to explain and even understand. The track also seems to invoke the idea that mere proximity with learning about memories, will not reduce the melancholy that resides in the person listening to the memory and for the people who holds them. Implying that, to be able to see, touch, hear, live the memories is the unattainable, but ideal way to connect to the past.

In addition, Sara Ahmed challenges the idea of freedom to be happy by critiquing how the Western norm of what happiness is has been used as a tool against migrants and the non-English/white folks, as a means to bring normative actions and behaviors into the society. The more aligned they are to that culture, the more happy they will feel as their culture and norms hold value, and are far away from a stagnant life. The freedom to happiness, thus becomes the freedom to identify with the nation leading to questions of whether or not there is actually freedom to happiness if there are only particular ways or pursuits to it that is acceptable by society.