Today I presented at the Coordinated Arts Program’s conference. This is a conference in our program where students can present the work that they’ve been doing during their first year at university. I presented my work about love and grief in The Reluctant Fundamentalist which I shared some of in my previous blog post.

I heard about this opportunity through Dr. Luger, our Arts Studies professor, who organized the event. I was interested because I found what I talked about really interesting and wanted to share that with others as well as that thought that it would be a really cool experience. I did Speech and Debate for four years in high school so I’ve found myself comfortable speaking publicly because of that. So I submitted my proposal for my essay and waited. I missed the first email so when enough time elapsed and I thought they hadn’t emailed me, I assumed that I was rejected from the conference. It wasn’t until I got the program in my email that had my name on it weeks later that I learned that I had been accepted.

I was put on a panel for “Representing Grief and Nostalgia” which fit my paper perfectly as it is what I speak about almost exclusively. Unfortunately, I’ve been busy with other academics and recently sick so I wasn’t able to work on the presentation as much as I would have liked. I came into the conference with low expectations because I heard so many people in my CAP stream talk about how they weren’t going. When it was time for our panel, all of the seats that had been set out were filled with a couple of people watching from the sides and back of the room. I presented second, the only member of our panel that didn’t have a slideshow, and the speech went well (I like to imagine). I found that the questioning period was the most fascinating part of the whole experience though. I found it super interesting when the other members of our panel would get the opportunity to open up more about their work and what they thought about it. The only low light of the whole experience was when someone asked me a simple question and I started answering it and forgot what I was saying half way through. It was quite embarrassing but I imagine it was amusing as an audience member to watch that.

Despite that, the conference allowed me to remember my love for public speaking and it allowed me to gain a little bit of confidence about my intelligence. Two things that I didn’t really expect to gain from this.

I am currently writing an essay about how love and death are intertwined and create nostalgia. In this essay, I focus this argument on how it relates to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and I use the works of Danielle Barkley, an English professor at McGill University, and Megan Moore, a medieval literature scholar to further detail the discussion.

Barkley writes, “writing about the past and seeking to retrieve it … is essentially always an act of desire, reflective of the longing to take the emptiness created by the loss of a time and place and fill it with an imaginative reconstruction.” Instead of reconstructing the past, Changez spends his time creating ideas of what the present would look like if Erica and him were still together. On page 172, Changez lists, “We would have woken in my bedroom and breakfasted with my parents; we would have dressed for work and caressed in the shower; we would have sat on our scooter and driven to campus.” He continues on for a whole paragraph detailing how their lives currently would differ if she was with him. Instead of moving on from Erica, Changez takes time to focus on the longing and emptiness that she left with him when she left him. Imagining her with him allows him to be able to mend the longing that he feels for her, even if it is just short lived. In this fantasy, Erica is with him wherever he goes, when he is at home, work, out with friends. By imagining the present in an idyllic way, Erica has never died and has never left and life can remain feeling normal and safe for Changez. And yet, thinking too deeply about Erica makes him realize how much he longs for her. Moore states, “…understanding of the emotional tenor of romance pairs “amours” and “duel” – love and grief.”