Sitting By the River by Ananna Rafa

Encompassing themes of motherhood, identity and the politics of domestic labor in Bangladesh, this series consists of a collection of photographs, poetry and conversations which maps the memories of my childhood to reconcile my present-day ties to my motherland and family history.

In the moments that are captured within these photographs and in the aftermath of, speak to my anxieties about womanhood, cultural displacement, a fragmented immigrant identity and my struggle to reconnect with strained familial relations.

In 2018, I returned to my birthplace, Dhaka Bangladesh, to document and reconnect with my ailing grandmother, Rani. What started as a documentary project on my grandmother turned into a navigation of my own identity and revisiting family histories. I continued to travel back and forth between Bangladesh and Toronto the following year and from 2018-2019 I had shot an archive of over 100 photographs in Bangladesh. I felt a yearning for two geographic locations, with two distinct relations, my current home Toronto, Canada, and my birthplace Dhaka, Bangladesh. Yet, I belonged to neither. What was foreign became familiar, what was familiar became foreign.

Growing up in an immigrant house, I denoted a sense of national and cultural pride to my birth country. After spending almost 10 years abroad, I found myself questioning this very concept of the motherland as a symbol of innate belonging. Indeed, I felt a sense of physical belonging to my motherland, to the seas and river lands. The hot and humid air, the fog of the city loomed over me. Yet, my cousins referred to me as a foreigner in the place I once called home. As I came of age in a ‘foreign land’ (Toronto) the concept of ‘home’ became more complicated, no longer a geographic location nor a cultural belonging.