Awakenings

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
- Charlie Parker

What exactly is an awakening? The dictionary defines it as a “transcendent and profound insight, which causes one to see more,” or “a sphere where dualities or pairs of opposites do not exist.” Apparently, the dictionary is not a very interesting read. The word duality, however, sticks to my mind. Am I not a living and breathing example? Although, I moved to America from Bangladesh when I was barley one year old, to my parents, Bangladesh remained our true home. This struggle between my twos cultures raged on within me until I discovered how to tame it – until I found music.

The starting point of the collage is the CD. A CD, usually used to hold music, is a device for storage and for memory. It represents my life, my memories, and my experiences. However, the CD is split in the middle to symbolize my own split between cultures. I used a CD that was half white and half black to capture the Chinese theory of yin yang – of two mutually interdependent and constantly interacting polar energies. I further developed the duality of my two cultures by spray painting the left side of the base with vibrant green and red paint to represent the flag of
Bangladesh. On the right side of the CD, I colored in blue and white stars to represent the
United States. The Bengali side is so bright because I wanted to capture the richness of my culture, and also because my parents continue to cling onto their native culture rather than assimilate. That’s why the American side is only colored with crayons and much more monotonous. To increase the effect, I used gray construction paper as the background. Leaving empty gray spaces in the collage was just as revealing as drawing stuff.

The remaining parts of the collage are made out of my own acoustic guitar. The main focus of the collage is the center, the fret board. I did not have a saw so I had to resort to hammers, scissors, and my own body weight to detach the neck from the guitar. I interpreted the fret board as a road. I choose what notes I play, and therefore I choose my own path. The three tuners, that essentially hold my life in tune, are used to combine my two cultures together. The strings coming out of these tuners unravel around the fret board and more importantly, the CD. The wires become entangled because my cultures are entangled. They are not two separate pieces, but rather one whole, based on my experiences in the road of life.

Music has been a great factor in my life. It has the power to heal, comfort, inspire and even change someone. Music has allowed me to meet great people, particularly other Bengali musicians. Through music, I feel that I finally grasped my Bengali heritage and combined it with my American upbringing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 3:10 pm and is filed under