[Reader-list] Wounded Nation, Still The Dreamer

Tue Oct 17 22:46:28 IST 2006

http://shobakorg.blogspot.com

Wounded Nation, Still The Dreamer
- Naeem Mohaiemen

"You and I are of that clan
The one that sings in the middle of pain
That painful scream is the only song, of this dead
century."
[ Humayun Azad, Bangla Bhashar Shothru Mithro, 1999]

On Friday, after I sent the umpteenth SMS to various
cell phones with the message "Nobel Prize!" one friend
fired back, "Basta Ya! What is with this irritating
display of nationalism! I thought you were above all
this?"

Somehow my recent bread crumb trail has manufactured a
persona where a burst of patriotism is unexpected and
unsettling. In the earlier "Young Turks" piece I
wrote, "I am wary of excessive nationalism because it
can quickly lead to chauvinism and exclusion."
Apparently not enough of a caveat.

The macro reaction to Muhammad Yunus' Nobel Prize has
been an unprecedented show of pride among Bengalis on
both sides of the border (Bangladesh & West Bengal).
Within an hour of the announcement, a noted professor
was demanding that Yunus take charge of the caretaker
government (Bangladesh is constitutionally required to
hold elections under a caretaker government to prevent
vote rigging).

"Yunus, Save The Nation" went the cry.

Microcredit is a done deal. Now come and rescue the
country from political chaos.

A savior for all seasons?

I'm hard-pressed to think of another recent Nobel
Laureate where every single photo shows him surrounded
by hordes of people, all waving at the camera.
Contrast this with the sober, almost dour, photo of
Orhan Pamuk leaving the Columbia University campus,
followed by two lonely camera crews. It's New York --
everyone is too blasé anyway.

Are Bengalis a uniquely emotional people, as per every
cliché since time immemorial? "Two Bengalis is a
political party, Three Bengalis is a political party
and a splinter group, Four Bengalis is civil war." Or
is there more going on?

There are, of course, structural reasons for the
jubilation response to this announcement. Shirin
Ebadi's win was seen as a slap in the face of the
mullahcracy, so the Iranian government's reaction was
subdued. In Turkey, Pamuk's position on the Armenian
genocide flays at the raw nerve of exclusionary
nationalism, leading the Turkish President to only
make an obscure reference to export of Turkish "cotton
and figs" ("Pamuk" means "cotton"). El Baradei? Well,
it's hard to calculate which country (or region)
should celebrate his victory. By contrast, the
notoriously antagonistic Bangla government (Khaleda
Zia) and opposition (Sheikh Hasina) were temporarily
united in the rush to congratulate Yunus.

Ah, those turbo-charged headlines! "Nobel Hero", "How
Grameen Changed The World", "Nation Parties on Nobel
Win". Our version of "party" is flower garlands,
receptions, speeches and a Fakir Alamgir song. But,
still...

Why does a Nobel Prize matter so much for Bangladesh?
Muhammad Yunus is the third Bengali to win the award,
after Rabindranath Tagore (1913: Literature) and
Amartya Sen (1998: Economics). Sen's roots are in East
Bengal, and Tagore spent some of his life in the
same-- but neither were ever technically citizens of
post-partition East Pakistan (later Bangladesh),
although Tagore's song is the national anthem. Yunus
is alone in being technically and actually a
Bangladeshi citizen, and therefore some kind of
"first" in this victory. Reason for a little something
extra. Everyone likes the "first" something.

Apparently Bono was the front-runner -- now that would
truly have been a useless, vanity award to the last
remaining shill for Bush and brutal crusher of
Negativland. But for most Bangalis, every year has
been marked by a moment of wondering before the awards
are announced. During an interview to Rolling Stone in
1992, a pre-Presidential Bill Clinton name-checked
Yunus and said "he should" win the Nobel Prize. Ever
since then, Yunus has invariably been mentioned as a
candidate every year. There was a tussle over whether
Yunus should get the award in Economics, but wiser
heads strategically nominated him for Peace instead.

Why a nationalist project in this century, when these
parochial feelings are supposed to be closeted. All
sorts of ummah identity are to be the new
transnational glue -- South Asian, Subcontinental,
Deshi, Asian, Pan-Asian, Muslim, Southern, Third
World, pick your kurta. But suddenly back to the
national borders. Or is it forward to...?

For my friends who have moved to a beyond-nation
position, it's hard to explain a psyche that craves
national heroes. For three decades, Bangladesh has
struggled under the weight of the impossible, sky-high
expectations created by the 1971 liberation war and
the rise of Sheikh Mujib as a demi-god figure. Mujib's
belief in his god status was so invincible, when the
Army majors burst into his Dhanmondi home, instead of
hiding he confronted them with the barked command
"Thora Ki Chash?" (What Do You Boys Want) This is the
way we address young boys, near ones or servants. But
these were no servants, but killers who cared little
for god-rules. For a soldier willing to rip Mujib's
chest open with machine gun fire and then hunt down
and kill every member of his family, there were no
boundaries. Perhaps they were the originating
atheists, determined to "Kill Your Idols" long before
it was a grunge slogan.

>From the dark days of August 1975, Bangladesh has seen
many downs and downs. Judas kiss (Khondoker
Mosharraf), jail killings (four AL leaders), army
musical chairs (Khaled Mosharraf), "Shipai Shipai Bhai
Bhai " (the mass mutiny), secret execution of the
crippled war hero (Abu Taher), "I will make politics
difficult" (General Zia), mysterious "mob" death
(Zia's assassin Manzur), frog-not-prince (Abdus
Sattar), "Every sonofabitch now a poet" (General
Ershad), the return of the Collaborator (Ghulam Azam),
and the continuing confrontation of the last fifteen
years between the two main heirs (Mujib's daughter
Hasina, and Zia's wife Khaleda -- women leading the
two main dynasties, and yet this is no progress for
feminism!).

Politics is not everything, but this spiraling death
game has poisoned many aspects of Bangladesh's
trajectory. Think of Jimmy Carter's "national malaise"
times ten (no Cowboy to our rescue). The new great
game added in the last few years is the
much-exaggerated idea of a "new Taliban" coming from
Bangladesh. Another zero-zero image game.

A nation that cannot define itself is forced to
swallow others' definitions. When Henry Kissinger,
smarting over the humiliation of Bangladesh's
independence (in defiance of Nixon's policy of arming
the Pakistani army), called the country a "bottomless
basket", he opened a Pandora's Box of image
assassination. Thirty years on, every new government
feels the need to say to a foreign magazine
interviewer, at least once, "Well, you know we are no
longer that bottomless basket, we are self-sufficient
in food..." Kissinger is now a national homage site,
or rather a monument to be smashed. Calling
Christopher Hitchens...

Lazy journalism and media caricature always needs a
country to be "Timbuktu" -- a symbol for distance,
dystopia, mystery, poverty, or anarchy. In the last
few years, Bangladesh also finds itself trapped inside
the box of Islam. Fighting a rising militant Islamic
threat inside its borders, the country is now the
focus of unwelcome attention from both India and the
US. A steady drumbeat of parachute journalism about
"Talibanization."

There are, predictably, a roll-call of achievements
that are ignored -- dramatic increases in food
sufficiency, child vaccination rates that are higher
than the US, drop in child mortality, accelerating
literacy rate, increase in female education (many of
these indicators better than neighboring India),
exploding export sector, literal rags-to-riches story
as one of the largest suppliers of readymade garments
to the world, a technologically savvy youth culture,
construction boom, digital divide leapfrogging,
fiercely free press, empowered women, and home to the
largest number of NGOs and by extension a huge number
of successful development, social welfare and
grassroots organizing models. But none of these are
particularly sexy, or bite-size stories. A universal
oral saline solution -- that would never get newsrooms
buzzing.

These paradoxes are what make this nation so
vulnerable to emotion and wild mood swings. In the
midst of a poverty scenario, somehow a global
"happiness" survey pronounced Bangladeshi people to be
the "happiest in the world"! It is in this context
that the Yunus Nobel has been appropriated and turned
into something larger than its provenance. All the
frustrated desires for a hero, a cause, a pride flag,
have now been projected onto one man, institution and
moment.

Trying to make sense of a national pride project
(while insisting to my skeptical friends that this is
different from jingoism), I went back to my archives
and dug out an email I had written from Dhaka last
December. Filming back-to-back rallies by Islamist
groups and Secularists, and finding the latter tiny
and outnumbered, I was in a blue mood reflecting the
national tenor. The country was reeling through an
unbroken chain of political violence, magnified by
"suicide bombings" by militant Islamists. Those six
months of chaos were considered the gravest threat to
Bangladesh's future since the 1971 war.

Foraging for optimism, the NEW AGE ran a special issue
on "Our Heroes". The lead editorial searched for
hopeful words:

Bombs. Chaos. Lip service. Political impasse. More
bombs. Partisan vitriol. Bipartisan inertia. Again,
bombs. Fear of terrorism, of a brainwashed,
uneducated, probably unthinking Islamist militant
walking into your workplace/school carrying an
innocent enough looking tiffin box that suddenly blows
up in your face.
 Life in Bangladesh in 2005 was like
being in an unending labyrinth of fear and
frustration. But even as the powers that be foster a
society where faith in faux-religious dogma is
increasingly threatening to uproot faith in humanity,
countless others continue to stem the tide by being
torchbearers of just that - humanity, the human
spirit. Not necessarily by achieving extraordinary
feats, but by simply doing their job well, they remind
us that there must surely be a way out of the
labyrinth....These are our heroes."

But hajar holeo I am a Bengali. Words in English, in a
newspaper read by the country's elite and embassies,
cannot touch an emotional chord. I needed to hear it
in Bengali.

Finally, on a gloomy December 16th, known in more
hopeful times as Independence Day, the weekly
SHAPTAHIK 2000 mustered up unknown reserves of
optimism to bring out their cover story.

A green-red cover, echoing the flag.

A cloud cluster of words, tracing the shape of the
map.

Among the many words, I could make out the following:
Terrorism Cross-fire Bomb blasts Traffic Jam Murder
Poison Pen Militancy Brain Drain Fundamentalism Gas
crisis Bribery Water crisis Inflation Scandal Monga
Fraud Bank loot Blackout

And underneath that long litany, an impossible
defiance:

"Standing in the middle of a pile of smoke, we still
dream of a prosperous, stable Bangladesh.

A country where the Fundamentalists will have no space

Where we can smash their throne of blood to pieces.

Bengalis are on a cursed journey, but we still dream
among the ashes"

And then the seemingly impossible headline:

AND YET, I STILL LOVE BANGLADESH

"From a wounded land and people, who won't stop
dreaming."

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
BIBLIOGRAPHY
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
To see the magazine cover
http://shobakorg.blogspot.com/2006/10/still-dreamer_17.html
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1. NOBEL: National Euphoria State
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/10/16/d61016070883p.htm
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/10/15/d61015060252p.htm
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/10/14/d6101401011p.htm
http://www.ittefaq.com/uploaded/06/10/17/65833_1_a.jpg
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/10/17/d6101701011.htm
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/13/asia/AS_GEN_Nobel_Peace_Little_Loans.php

2. NEW AGE: Heroes for a Beleagured Nation

SCIENCE: Jafar Iqbal & Quantum Leap
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/heroes01.html

BIOLOGY: Farhad Mazhar & Seed Shall Set You Free
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/heroes03.html

RELIGION: Brother Ronald Drahozal, Missionary Apart
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/heroes07.html

THEATER: Selim Al Deen, Our Stories Our Way
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/heroes04.html

LAW: Rokan Ud-Dawla, Man on the street
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/heroes10.html

HISTORY: Sirajul Islam & the Banglapedia Project
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/heroes02.html

ART: Shishir Bhattacharyas Quest for Human Rights
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/02/18/d60218140195.htm

ART: Kanak Chanpa Chakma, Brushstrokes of brilliance
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/heroes08.html

CREDIT: Shamima Khatun, from Biralakkhi to New York
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/heroes05.html

Ten Faces of the Next Generation
http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jan/01/newyear06/ff.html#01

3. BUSINESS: Goldman Sachs lists Bangladesh as one of
11 with greatest potential
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/24/bloomberg/sxmuk.php

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