Dream that Does not Let You Sleep

Sabiha Huq

1986, Maischari at Mahalchari in Khagrachari district in the Chittagong hill tracts in Bangladesh. Midday, all quiet. A young girl, ninth grader, heard a sudden commotion while taking shower.

Fire! Fire!

These words gave her a startle and she hurriedly came out of the washroom. Her mother and younger sisters were trembling in fear, while her father stood there to assure them with his presence. Her mother, a schoolteacher, knew how to save her daughters, and she instantly took them to the fields behind their house. The father, a college teacher, silently followed suit. His presence gave the women all the strength needed in that moment of crisis.

“They have set fire to our entire village.”

The young girl wanted to cry, but her fear was too strong to let her utter the shriek that was choking her. Who were those people that set their houses on fire? Were they not neighbours? Were they not fellow Bangladeshis?

After all these years, that very young girl is in her forties and work at a university in Australia. She has two daughters studying in the university who often remind her of her own childhood. She feels blessed for whatever reason she has settled in Australia, where her daughters would not wake up in the middle of the night or tremble in fear for life in an awkward situation. Who knows? They might. The bushfire in 2020 cracked the earth for innocent animals in the southeastern part of Australia, and perhaps humans were not safe either. However, not even the wild animals are as vulnerable as the ethnic communities living in hilly areas of Bangladesh.

This story is about Urmee Chakma. Receiving a PhD in education in August 2021, she is one of the pioneers in the Chakma community. Her uncle Niru Kumar Chakma was one of the first men who had earned PhD years back. Urmee Chakma does not boast of it, rather she is a modest and shy person whose only wish is to spread the message that if a person has a strong will and works accordingly towards her goal, she will surely reach it. She is from a high-class Chakma family, and she knows quite well what a girl from an ordinary household could have faced had she been in her situation. After that horrid childhood, she desperately wanted to get out of the box full of fears. It was not easy though. Her first degree was in English Literature from the University of Dhaka. After that she left with her husband for a new life in a new country. Their years in Australia were panoramic. She pursued her higher studies and worked off and on. She has served as an educator for over 15 years, having taught at several universities and language institutes in Australia. Now she is teaching at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Urmee Chakma has published her research in reputed journals and her areas of research interest include Indigenous education, diasporic communities, citizenship studies, power, and social justice. Her PhD thesis dissertation “Empowerment and Desubalternising Voices through Education – A Case Study of Diasporic Indigenous Chakma in Melbourne” talks about immigrant Chakma people’s struggle in Australia. The thesis has been published by Routledge this year with the title Empowering Subaltern Voices through Education: The Chakma Diaspora in Australia, and it will create ripples in the educated section of Bangladeshi diaspora all over the world. Urmee Chakma’s questions regarding the state’s failure to protect the rights of the Indigenous people remain valid till the society turns egalitarian and secular to ensure safety to all its citizens. She dreams of a Bangladesh free of racial prejudices. Urmee Chakma is a lighthouse not only for our Indigenous women; she is an inspiration for all men and women who believe in their dreams.