Queerness and Love in the South Asian Diaspora: Review of Bilal Baig’s Acha Bacha
Bilal Baig, Acha Bacha
Playwrights Canada Press, 2020. $17.95 CAD
Order a copy from Playwrights Canada Press.
Queer, trans-feminine, Muslim playwright Bilal Baig unapologetically pushes against the walls of white comfort in theatre to create space for South Asian queer communities in their debut play, Acha Bacha. This play confronts the South Asian psyche of religious trauma, family and love relationships, gender expression and homophobia without exploiting the trauma of queer South Asian people. Acha Bacha amplifies our ways of loving, receiving love and accepting ourselves with love above all else.
Acha Bacha tells a vulnerable story about the tensions between one’s cultural and familial allegiance and their own freedom of expression. The main character, Zaya is faced with the dilemma of supporting his sick mother while building a relationship with his queer partner, Salim. His worlds clash and Salim and Zaya’s mother must meet. Zaya’s mother represents a maternal figure through which patriarchal standards of masculinity and cultural religious conformity are maintained in the community. This vulnerability holds space for the characters’ paralleled attempts at romantic and familial love despite the cultural hoops through which they must jump. It allows space to center one’s unique experiences, albeit relatable to many queer South Asians, rather than exclusively engaging in identity politics, which can be troubling when it begins to reinforce problematic archetypes of queer people of colour.
Acha Bacha takes you on a non-linear journey of past memories and its manifested present reality where you perceive the pit stops of South Asian culture, Islam, queerness and sexuality until you realize they are all interconnected—one doesn’t exist without the other in Zaya’s reality. We see the same complex truth in the main character’s conundrum of love, but ultimately, the revealed challenge in love is in his perception of his own worthiness regardless of societal conventions and deeply seated familial norms. Baig gives us a taste of the underlying truths of love, acceptance, and progress in South Asian religious communities.
Baig exposes the South Asian queer mind through the main character’s lived experiences and traumas as Zaya processes them in his own non-linear timeline. He is imperfect, confused and chaotic in nature as he navigates his relationship to his mother and lover while being triggered by childhood trauma related to religion and sexuality. Through Zaya’s stream of consciousness, childhood memories resurface as he seeks to understand his own contradicting experience in his Pakistani Muslim community. As Zaya attempts to toe the line of facing his traumatic past and confronting its effect on the way he loves in the present, we see his anxiety affect many of his relationships, including his attempts to convince his lover, Salim, not to leave him for their pilgrimage journey.
Acha Bacha’s refreshing take on a queer relationship in which both partners are South Asian sets this play apart. Readers grapple with two brown queer people who speak the same language, Urdu, yet struggle to connect through the many languages of love as they not only express gender and freedom differently but also navigate their own self-acceptance at staggered paces. Ultimately, the play’s truth-telling exposes how a parent’s unwillingness to accept their child is disguised as self-preservation to maintain the status quo. Zaya is unable to control his mother’s actions in accepting Salim and validating his past trauma in Islamiyat school. Salim’s personal choices of freedom are also out of Zaya’s hands despite his desperate efforts to center himself in their life. The narrative points us to the main character’s introspective challenge of self-validation and finding acceptance within as his external projections on his mother and lover both fail.
The language used in the play evokes a genuine and casual tone between the characters. Baig is unapologetic about the inclusion of Urdu in their writing as they center the Pakistani-Muslim experience without translation. Beyond the linguistic complexities of the play reflecting the imperfections of manipulative family and relationship dynamics, the Urdu-English mashup is beautiful. The play is fairly easy to comprehend based on contextual English words carefully placed and is refreshing to read without attempts to translate Urdu phrases. Zaya’s dialogue with his mother in particular showcases the ease of both tongues when she says:
No. Meh Salim ke baare mein nahi baat karna chahati hoon. I want to talk about you. You say ke I am keeping secrets likhen tumko dekho. You think I am stupid? Meh sab kuch jaanti hoon, Zaya. Aur, I know everything for a long time. I know how you are. I know what you do (48)
This switch between languages amplifies directed emotion regardless of full linguistic understanding to enhance their tense dynamic.
Acha Bacha tells an unconventional story that centers truth and the nuances of South Asian queer and Muslim communities. Baig beautifully captures the psychological progression of someone reconciling their queer identity with cultural and religious norms. Ultimately, they demonstrate the possibility of genuinely loving ourselves and those we are in relationships with unconditionally. Acha Bacha reminds us that we can find this love beyond the existing gap of the liminal space between personal and cultural identity.
Originally from Malaysia, Amanda Jeysing is a storyteller and freelance writer now based in Ottawa who uses the mediums of writing and dance to share her contributions to decolonial expressions of freedom. Her food writing has been published on Spoon University and she was a finalist for the Fraser MacDougall Prize in 2018 for Best Canadian Voice in Human Rights Reporting on behalf of The Charlatan. Follow her on Instagram @foodventureswithpanda