JALAYBI.COM

From Main Street to my street

Jul 12, 2009 Pakistan, pakistan politics

Pakistanis have little regard for the shared spaces they inhabit in their everyday lives, writes Huma Yusuf.

During the eight years that I lived in the United States, I traversed many a Main Street, the centrepiece of American small towns and suburbia. A clock tower, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a post office, a bric-a-brac store carrying Halloween decorations even in April, a high-priced book store with esoteric poetry, a tanning salon: these were some of the staples of the Main Streets that I frequented along the East Coast.

While early encounters with Main Street USA were charming – ‘Oh my God!’ I once shouted to a friend. ‘It’s literally a white picket fence!’ – I later came to shudder at the thought of Main Streets. They began to feel generic and soulless – the product of an aspiring middle class that was socially conservative and inadvertently xenophobic. In my opinion, Main Street transformed from a string of pretty facades and friendly coffee shops into an unremarkable world in which affluent women spent afternoons buying tiny pearls and the spice of life could only be found in expensive culinary shops in the form of extra virgin olive oil with a dash of herbs.

Having consolidated this opinion of the proverbial American Main Street, I was pleasantly surprised to come across an online initiative, Mapping Main Street. The website is a collaborative documentary project that aims to celebrate the unique identity and culture of each Main Street in the US. As the founders of the website put it:

It all began last fall when “Main Street” became the political buzzword of the moment. We felt that when politicians and the media mentioned Main Street, they implied a singular place and culture. Against this reductive rhetoric, we pummeled Google with almost a million queries, and found that there are actually 10,466 streets named Main in the United States.

Now, Americans are invited go online to submit images, audio, video and written testimonies and descriptions about the Main Street that runs through their towns – they can personalise the ‘buzzword’ and populate it with personalities and places they care about.

A quick tour of the website, and I’m already finding myself revising my opinion of Main Street USA. After all, how can a street boasting a bar named ‘Fudgienuckles’ be soulless? And how can a Main Street marked with signs and advertisements in Spanish be xenophobic (check out San Luis, AZ)?

Clicking around the website and scrolling through images of streets called Main across America got me thinking. The desire to personalise, document and thereby differentiate a street is a sign of pride, a sign that belonging matters and that shared space is more important to a community than more abstract concepts such as ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘religion’, or ‘ethnicity.’ Caring about Main Street is a way of saying you care about the world you inhabit, the world that informs your everyday experience.

The obvious affection with which people in the US have tried to document and project the humble streets that run through their towns is in sharp contrast to the way in which Pakistanis think about their surroundings. We have less regard for the shared spaces we inhabit – streets, office spaces, public parks – and instead put a premium on non-spatial ways of belonging.

Our extended families craft our identities more distinctly than the streets on which we grow up. We identify more closely with people of the same ethnicity than those who share a profession, a passion, or even public transport with us. Most Pakistanis will confess to an affinity with the Muslim ummah that they have yet to exhibit with regard to their city, district, province or nation.

For these reasons, hyperlocal spaces like Main Streets – or more appropriately, khayabans or chaks – figure little in our public imagination or experience. Our politicians regularly refer to the ‘rural areas’ as a monolithic whole, writing off huge swathes of our country as if a village in Sanghar is the same as one in Charsadda.

It is also probably for this reason that our government hears frequent calls for new provinces to be created along linguistic or ethnic lines, but has to deal with few demands for grassroots development, on-the-ground economic initiatives and street-by-street security schemes. After all, if people are more worried about carving out a Seraiki province or championing Pakhtunkhwa, their advocacy will remain at the abstract and rhetorical level. It is only when the people want to see change at the most local level – the street, the neighbourhood, the city block, the specific sector of a katchi abadi – will the authorities feel the pressure to take tangible steps to improve the quality of life of Pakistanis.

The fact is, when you need a road fixed, a school down the road properly staffed or a corrupt official brought to justice, do you bind with those of the same ethnicity and religious sect as you, or do you turn to your neighbours and others who share the spaces in which you conduct your everyday life? Indeed, the few public protests Karachi has witnessed in recent weeks that don’t champion the goals of a particular ethnicity or sect are those in response to extended power outages. When the lights go out, people of the same locality take to the streets irrespective of their abstract allegiances.

As Mapping Main Street reminds us, the best civic engagement always happens at the street level. Take the example of Main Street in Chattanooga, TN, where people living in the vicinity have joined hands to rid their area of prostitution. If they were expending all their energies advocating for broader change, their centre street would soon fall to ruin.

Learning from Chattanooga, perhaps Pakistanis should think about getting to know their residential areas and work places a bit better. They should frequent the corner shops, parks, shrines and alleyways that add colour and character to their lives. They should learn the stories that make those around them proud or happy. They should figure out what – whether it be a law, a public utility, a private donation, or a twist of fate – makes the things that populate their everyday lives tick.

Maybe when Pakistanis start to think in terms of ‘my street’, they’ll transcend the jargon of identity politics and reap the benefits of local-level initiatives and improvement.

Source Dawn

Tags: Pakistan, pakistan politics, Street