Following is an open letter of complaint from Arafat Kazi to Dhaka Stage, a theatre troupe in Dhaka, Bangladesh:

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Dear Dhaka Stage:

Over the years, I’ve attended several of your plays. Off the top of my head, I can remember watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream and All in the Timing in the 90s, as well as one of Wilde’s plays. A few weeks ago, I saw a poster for today’s and tomorrow’s staging of your adaptation of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Being a fan of Douglas Adams, the theater, entertainment in general, and with pleasant memories of Dhaka Stage in my mind, I went to buy tickets at the Nordic Club for my friends today. I was refused on the grounds of, specifically, not being “foreign”.

I don’t want to go into the etymology of “foreign” and argue that, as your average rich Bangladeshi I was, in fact, an Other figure. I didn’t want to go back home to get my Green Card (Bangladeshi foreignness apotheosized). Curiously, my biggest reason for wanting tickets was to show my girlfriend a good time. We had met while I was living in Boston and she in New York, and both Boylston Street and Times Square featured prominently in our courtship. Interestingly enough, this wonderful girl who loves me enough to travel to Bangladesh, is herself foreign. Not ABCD foreign, not European-posted-in-third-world foreign, but a white girl from Galloway, Ohio; American as apple pie until I curried her favor and carried her away.

I’ve studied at one of the greatest universities in the world, and loving Bangladesh enough to return home in spite of a Foreign Degree and Green Card, I can say that I understand the importance of preserving one’s cultural trappings in the face of strangeness. Since we’re all homogenized these days, the only great differences that exist anymore are between rich countries and poor countries, between the occident and the orient. Beyond understanding, I can even say that I empathize with this need to make sure that expatriates in Bangladesh don’t forget Western culture and like Kurtz go native.

The one difference I’ve seen elsewhere in the world, in this culture-preserving movement which is common to all immigrants, no matter where or how permanent, is that members of the host country are usually invited to participate or, at the very least, attend as guests. My friends used to drink beforehand so that they could survive the Bangla Society bore-a-thons hosted at MIT. I remember even trying to get them to listen to Bangla rock music, comparing James favorably to Iggy Pop and “Ekta Prem Dao” to “I Wanna Be Your Dog”.

Now Douglas Adams and Shakespeare will live on in greatness whether or not their works are performed by your piddling group. But hosting a play in Bangladesh, and then barring Bangladeshis from being able to watch it, smacks of arrogance, of self-importance and cultural egotism. I guess that, while I’m angry at not being able to watch the play, I could have justified my personal exclusion by writing it off as the exclusivist habits of a bunch of incompetents who’ve failed at both getting posted to nicer countries AND at befriending people from their host country, thereby essentially dooming themselves to the soiled pit of each others’ society. This would have been my personal reaction to being refused, as an individual member of society, from watching a live adaptation of one of my favorite novels ever. (I even have the original radio scripts.) But as an aesthete, as a patron of the higher arts, as a fan of Douglas Adams and other Greatest Hits of Literature Written In English (or translated to), this snootiness transmogrified itself, in my eyes, from petty racism and xenophobia to a complete refutation of all the qualities that have made literature great from the time of Wordsworth onwards. I can picture Byron raging at the injustice of it all, I can imagine DeQuincey writing to Keats, I can picture serious Arundhati Roy likening the incident to Gandhi on the train and unable to find her own family a seat when Dhaka Stage invites her to speak on tolerance and friendship. I thought of my own immigrant experience in America, and finally, I thought of the girl that I love, and her own situation as an expatriate living in Bangladesh. What if I had faced a similar situation when I walked into Boston University for the first time as the only brown student in my literature classes? Would I have spent Christmases in New Jersey with my best friend, and would he ever have been invited to my parents’ apartment for Eid? What about my girlfriend? What if my friends, instead of accepting her as a fellow human being, responded with the Dhaka Stage welcome and rejected her on the basis of her not being Bangladeshi?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, because thankfully, out of all the “foreigners” I know, both living in Bangladesh and all over the world, and all the Bangladeshis I know, similarly scattered across the globe, none of them are assholes. Pity you guys are.

Arafat Kazi