In the beginning, it may even be flattering: emails from boys you hardly knew in fifth grade who seek you out on the web from across decades and oceans. It's sweet to have them recall their little crushes.
And what about those comrades with whom you lost touch and who - now that their children have left and spouses are about to follow - seek out the comfort of old feminist networks ...?
Then there's the return to unfinished intellectual projects that invariably leads one back to academia; this time in the vain attempt to prove that citizenship in the real world affords more valuable lessons than all the theory churned out by those who remained as permanent residents within ivory towers. There's an undeniable sense of righteous joy in exposing those who like to pretend that they never sold out to the corporate world; in showing how they too are complicit with capitalism because knowledge is an expensive business after all.
But is revisiting the past ever really a good idea, or even worth the effort?
Overeager ex-boyfriends from school showing all sorts of interest in your professional development and the intimate details of your personal life, quickly start to become a bit creepy; nostalgic curiosity ends in cyber-stalking.
And old comrades are now often just old and troubled by the spectre of loneliness. They used to ask what could be done to overthrow patriarchy; now they simply want to know where all the good men have gone and how they might find one for themselves.
Meanwhile, the path to redemption via further academic accomplishment leads nowhere; one is little different from all those others who scramble up career ladders and chase success. We all conform and play the same game at last.
Having said that, there remains, of course, the shining hope of revisiting the past; i.e. that one just might reconnect with someone whom one should never have let go in the first place.
Also, crucially, it affords one the opportunity not to put things right, but, rather, to repeat mistakes - only this time without regret. For one looks back and travels back not in order to correct the past with the benefit of hindsight, but to make an affirmation of all that's been and of one's own life to date, complete with all its many errors and multiple stupidities.
Afiya S. Zia is a feminist scholar, activist, and provocateur based in Karachi. She is the author of Sex Crime in the Islamic Context (1994) and has also published numerous essays and articles. She is currently completing a new work entitled Faith and Feminism in Pakistan, whilst studying for a Ph.D. at the Women and Gender Studies Institute (University of Toronto).
Ms Zia appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind submission of a text written especially for this blog and, indeed, for the recent photo taken in Chelsea Market, NYC.
