If You Are In Chicago…

…then this may be worth stopping by for a listen:

The Dust From Blood Filled Eyes: On Bangladesh and Acknowledgment of Crimes

Chapter 9 of Totten, Parsons & Charny’s book Century of Genocide is dedicated to Bangladesh.

But my earliest realization of the horrors that had been inflicted on the people of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971 came through two poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Stay Away from Me (Bangladesh I)

How can I embellish this carnival of slaughter,

how decorate this massacre?

Whose attention could my lamenting blood attract?

There’s almost no blood in my rawboned body

and what’s left

isn’t enough to burn as oil in the lamp,

not enough to fill a wineglass.

It can feed no fire,

extinguish no thirst.

There’s a poverty of blood in my ravaged body—

a terrible poison now runs in it.

If you pierce my veins, each drop will foam

as venom at the cobra’s fangs.

Each drop is the anguished longing of ages’

the burning seal of a rage hushed up for years.

Beware of me. My body is a river of poison.

Stay away from me. My body is a parched log in the desert.

If you burn it, you won’t see the cypress or the jasmine,

but my bones blossoming like thorns in the cactus.

If you throw it in the forests,

instead of morning perfumes, you’ll scatter

the dust of my seared soul.

So stay away from me. Because I’m thirsting for blood.

Bangladesh II

This is how my sorrow became visible:

its dust, piling up for years in my heart,

finally reached my eyes,

the bitterness now so clear that

I had to listen when my friends

told me to wash my eyes with blood.

Everything at once was tangled in blood—

each face, each idol, red everywhere.

Blood swept over the sun, washing away its gold.

The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished.

The sky promised a morning of blood,

and the night wept only blood.

The trees hardened into crimson pillars.

All flowers filled their eyes with blood.

And every glance was an arrow,

each pierced image blood. This blood

–a river crying out for martyrs—

flows on its longing. And in sorrow, in rage, in love.

Let it flow. Should it be dammed up,

there will only be hatred cloaked in colors of death.

Don’t let this happen, my friends,

bring all my tears back instead,

a flood to fill my dust-filled eyes,

to wash this blood forever from my eyes.

(Translations by Agha Shahid Ali, from his book The Rebel’s Silhouette)

These poems, when I first came across them in the early 1980s, cut past all the obfuscations and euphemisms that until then had been used by Pakistanis to speak about the 1971 conflict. More than any official history book, these words revealed how a nation inflicted such deep and inexcusable suffering on to its own body politic. And much of it on the basic of vanity and bigotry.

It is estimated that nearly 3 million East Pakistanis were killed in a 9 month period. Over 10 million were displaced because of the mayhem created by members of Pakistan’s military and political establishment. The East Pakistani’s crime was a determined, non-violent political movement to claim their rightful place at the head of the Pakistani government.

The 1970s elections had been fairly and overwhelmingly won by the then province of East Pakistan. But handing the levers of power to a people spoken about it the lowest and most rascists terms by the members of West Paksitan’s elite was unthinkable.

A genocidal campaign to break them was more palatable.

And it was a campaign carried out with the encouragement and support of that ‘liberal, democratic’ leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his excellent memoir Journey to Disillusionment, Sherbaz Khan Mazari reveals the inside story of this ambitious and ultimately flawed individual who not only precipitated 2 major wars, but began and sustained his career by getting in to bed with Pakistan’s military henchmen.

His later legacies would include the mutilation of Pakistan’s constitution in 1973 with the infusion of questionable, obscurantist and basically unjust ‘Islamic’ clauses and amendments that would lay the ground work for regional calls for ‘Sharia Law’, and are in fact the foundations for the recent crisis in Swat. But I will write more about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his legacy in a separate post.

Pakistan has never formally acknowledged its crimes in Bangladesh, nor prosecuted any of those involved which includes some of the top member’s of the military brass and the political establishment On May 16th when the Bangladeshi Foreign Minister officially asked the Pakistani Government, through its Bangladesh High Commissioner, for an acknowledgment, prosecution and an apology, the Pakistani envoy responded by saying ‘Let bygones, be bygones’

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Saiful Haq Omi is a young Bangladesh photographer. One of a new generation of amazingly talented photographers emerging from that country. In fact, I can’t stop talking about photographers like Shehzad Noorani and Munem Wasif and others that this often forgotten country has managed to unleash onto the world stage. They are in my opinion amongst the very best working anywhere in the world today.

In a short email exchange, as I congratulated Saiful Haq on being a finalist for the prestigious Alexia Foundation Grant, (NOTE: he was also a finalist for the 2009 Aftermath Grant) I mentioned to him how much I would love to visit Bangladesh some day, and do some work there, as a small gesture of friendship and atonement for what I know has been a bloody, brutal and perhaps most painful to a new generation of Bangladeshis, an unacknowledged crime.

His response, as all Bangladeshis seem to respond when I raise this issue – with a combination of gentle humility and anxious openness was – and I quote:

I was born 10 years after the war ended, 1980. But I have carried war in my heart. Almost half of my family died , they were all killed. And if you come to my home , on the 26th of March- Our liberation day or on the 16th december , our victory day you would hear that someone still cries. And that is my mother who is crying.

I carry the war in my heart , I carry the war which I never saw, but I will carry till my last day. The War is Me!

Perhaps the Pakistani envoy would do well to  remember that it is the victim that chooses to forgive, to decide whether a bygone is a bygone. The sheer arrogance, callousness and inhumane indifference exhibited by the ‘official’ voices of Pakistan is stagering if not outright criminal!

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We lack processes for forgiveness. For a region that has seen so many genocidal massacres, I find it strange that we, the people of South Asia, have few if any processes for forgiveness. Sara Terry is an American photographer who has done extensive work on the aftermath of war. Her project on post-war Bosnia – Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace, remains for me one of the finest examples of photojournalism that i know of. More recently she has been involved in a brilliant and creative project documenting indigenous practices of reconciliation and forgiveness in the continent of Africa.

We would do well to learn from the Africans. I can’t wait to see the results of Sara’s work.

In the mean time, as the official voices of Pakistan remain silent if not outright dismissive, members of the Action For A Progressive Pakistan have come forward and spoken from which I quote:

The outrageous dismissal of Bangladesh’s demand by the Pakistani foreign office – “let bygones be bygones” – is a shameful reflection of Pakistan’s constructed amnesia over the horrific actions of its Army and its political leadership. Not only has there never been a move on the part of the Pakistani state to apologize to Bangladesh, there has not been any sustained effort by citizens’ groups to pressure the government to publicly acknowledge the truth.

As Pakistanis, we find this unconscionable. We find it unconscionable that the Pakistani army raped, killed and pillaged our brothers and sisters in East Pakistan in 1971. We find it unconscionable that the Pakistani state has steadfastly refused to acknowledge these atrocities for the past 38 years, leave alone hold those responsible for them accountable as suggested by its own Chief Justice in the State commissioned inquiry. We reject the Pakistani state and army’s claim that these atrocities were committed in our name.

Its not much. But it is a start. I hope that the Bangladeshis will be patient as we work ourselves towards the truth. It is a lot to ask, perhaps unreasonably so of a people terribly wronged. But it may be the only thing that can offer the tears that eventually remove the dust from our blood filled eyes.

Not Just Dancing: Our Music Carries Our Pain

There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America’s insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and American’s obsession with order, our move towards revolution and America’s belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the ‘third world’, our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America’s preference for pliable allies, our desires to see our national soil free of foreign occupation and America’s alleged need for military bases.

Eqbal Ahmed in a dialogue with Samuel Huntington, from No More Vietnams: War and the Future of American Policy

The streets of Pakistan may not be filled with photogenic ‘rebel types’ to fill our evening TV screens here in Europe and the USA. However, voices for change, social justice and rights are strong and largely coming from a new generation of students, activists, intellectuals and ordinary citizens. I can’t help but feel that we are saying farewell to the accommodations and compromises of our parent’s generation, and that a new Pakistani society is working its way up into the seats of power and civil society. And that it is a society that is young, educated, religiously conservative but without being fanatical and intellectually empty.

And as always, when it comes to nations of ‘the other world’, these changes are largely being missed by a media largely obsessed with matters of American policy and insisting on seeing Pakistan less as a diverse, complex and sovereign nation and more as a ‘vassal’ state to American state power and geopolitical priorities in South Asia.

The rock band ‘Laal’ (means the color red in Urdu) has been a musical voice for these transformations. Below is a beautiful version of one of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems put to music, at a time when the citizens of Pakistan have confronted power and achieved the reinstatement of the ousted Supreme Court Justices -  a landmark moment in Pakistani political, social and civic history.

This video itself captures the anger, frustration and marginalization that sits in the hearts of the ordinary Pakistani.

Faiz’s words give these feelings the immortality, dignity and the honor that they deserve.

The video has English translations for those of you who may not understand Urdu.  Particularly Faiz’s magnificently musical, lyrical Urdu!

more about “Not Just Dancing: Pakistan’s Activist…“, posted with vodpod

Unraveling Bitter Threads

The only man I have ever felt envious of was a ‘celebrity’ documentary filmmaker who once told an interviewer that his success was a result of his complete lack of introspection!

Introspection has been the bane of my existence.

I heard Faiz Ahmed Faiz before I ever read him.  His poem ‘Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again’ - sung by the likes of Begum Akhtar and Noor Jehan is famous for its bold challenge to the Beloved (whether this is mortal or the Divine is usually left unspecific) to accept that his social commitment, his sense of moral outrage, is more important than even his love for him/her.  Agha Shahid Ali in his book ‘The Rebel’s Silhouette’ called it ‘revolutionary’.

I did not know that when I first heard it.  But if I ever have to explain how my life fell offs its well structured, predictable, conventional, safe, insular and material success oriented railway track to its current antithesis then I always begin by turning to this poem.

That which was then ours, my love,

don’t ask me for that love again.

Many have tried to explain the unraveling of what had so carefully been constructed for me, particularly those ‘friends’ and ‘colleagues’ who have continued on their paths and are now successful bankers, entrepreneurs, managers and what not.  And I accept that their explanations may be truer than my own. I know that they are crueler.

I however believe that the seeds of doubt about the ideas and views of my life were planted when, just days after I had heard this poem, I saw something that affected me more deeply than I could have then imagined.  The circumstances were so coincidental, between the hearing of this poem and the sight, that I can only look back and weave them into some sort of meaningful event.  At the time though, I had no such awareness

The world then was gold, burnished with lights…

and only because of you.  That’s what I had believed.

I heard a recording of the poem, sung by the famous Pakistani/Indian singer Noor Jehan, in the home of a private maths tutor.  Abdul Rehman was a bit of a rebel, a radical teacher at the boy’s school I attended.  Private tuition was essential because the school fees apparently only guaranteed us corporal punishment and verbal abuse.  You had to pay someone extra to get to the education.

Abdul Rehman loved music and was not shy about playing it while we worked through of exercises and lessons.  I remember him stopping us and asking us to listen to the words.

All this I had thought, all this I had believed.

But there were other sorrows, comforts other than love

The rich had cast their spell on history:

dark centuries had been embroidered on brocades and silks.

A few days after hearing the poem I encountered, while walking back from the local market, 2 small children, no older than 5 perhaps, holding hands and sifting through offal outside a butcher’s shop looking for something to eat.

Bitter threads began to unravel before me

as I went into alleys and in open markets

saw bodies plastered with ash, bathed in blood.

There are moment of one’s life that make such an impression that they become only more vivid with the passage of time.

I have never forgotten those two small children and the gentle way they held each other for support.  Their uncertain steps, their dirt covered skin, their hair of a color that suggested something other than natural.  And those eyes, eyes that cast a look that cut through all the desperately enacted civilized veneer of a middle class society living amongst so much deprivation, as they attempted to figure out what parts of the discarded entrails could be taken as food.

I stopped.

I looked.

I stared.

I remember a feeling of embarrassment at being the only one stopping to stare.

I moved on but acutely aware that I had seen something remarkable and that some barrier had been breached.

I saw them sold and bought, again and again.

This too deserves attention.  I can’t help but look back

when I return from those alleys – what should I do?

That was over 20 years ago, but as Faiz said ‘I can’t help but look back when I return from those alleys – what should I do?’. Those 2 children have never left me.  It is with them that I begin to see the world more clearly, to understand my place in it, to question what passes for ‘life’ amongst the upper echelons of society and to explore the makings of our modern world and why it is the way it is.  Perhaps most importantly, those 2 children, the dregs of Pakistan’s modernity, made me understand a country that I had until then loved unconditionally and defended thoughtlessly.

There are other sorrows in this world,

comforts other than love.

Don’s ask me, my love, for that love again.

(Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from Agha Shahid Ali’s translation)

I am thinking about all this because Gaza is burning.  Hundreds are being killed on the basis of false premises and prejudiced values.  Hundreds are being killed to serve the power aspirations of a handful of powerful people.  Dare we question the obvious? Dare we begin to ask ourselves how we are part of this process where the struggles of the weak have become synonymous with ‘terrorism’, the oppressions of the powerful with ‘liberty and democracy’. I am thinking of all this because each hour our respectable and valued news organizations continue to fill the air waves and the digital highways with a world view defined by the powerful and justifications for mass slaughter and murder that require us to believe that we are on the side of the civilized for as long as we say nothing in the face of this madness.

I am thinking of this because I am thinking of the Palestinians and I am thinking back to an anecdote Eqbal Ahmed spoke about – a meeting between Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Edward Said in war torn Beirut in 1980.  I am thinking about another poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who became a voice of his people and of their suffering.  Faiz gave voice to the best that is in Pakistan, for which he was jailed, tortured and later sent into exile.  The Palestinians too have been permanently been sent into exile.  Or, better if I end this by quoting Darwish himself:

They fettered his mouth with chains, And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.

They said: You’re a murderer.

They took his food, his clothes and his banners, And threw him into the well of the dead.

They said: You’re a thief.

They threw him out of every port, And took away his young beloved.

And then they said: You’re a refugee.

(Mahmoud Darwish)

I envy the man with no capacity for introspection.  It saves him from being a refugee from this world of powers that obfuscate it and manipulate it so that we believe it is a heaven, a civilized place where lives are lived with intentions and actions that serve the greater good.  I am thinking about all this today, yet another today like so many thousands of previous ones and many more to come.  Insha’allah.