Looking at the daylight shows – people

Only get injured to die and repose;

There exists no other unsullied public policy.

Those people, that nation which survives,

Becomes a person – builds state – desires something large, like

An Empire. Empires, thereby, collapse at a person’s mandate

Only to be rebuilt

By his insatiable thirst. 

                                                                                            (‘Janantike’, Jibanananda Das)
 

This morning, as I was reading Jibanananda Das, a Bengali poet who passed away almost seventy years ago, more than ten thousand people have already been killed in Gaza by a genocide, which, strangely, has invited more urgings on the behest of principle than on the question of crimes against humanity. This beating around the bush seems strange every time it surfaces, although, as an intellectual custom, it is not new. All so-called ‘wars’ must be ‘just,’ because there are prizes for both the soldiers who perform them and the politicians who engineer them, and eventually, a new political order disseminates. Similarly, the institutional arbiters who tend to interpret events ‘rationally’ and ‘impartially’ so that a ‘just’ discourse is served, need proper frameworks of reason and criticality to rationalise and historically situate the structured efforts of slaughter, and subsequent ‘cleansing’ of the group of people who happen to be insignificant to the so-called advanced world, a world whose financial foundation is cemented by the profits and losses of war-economy. I am not a political analyst or an economist, and neither do I need to procure those high seats to simply apprehend that, in those wars where even plunders are not materialistically produced, the act itself must be profitable, because the ‘money-bags’ are not so naïve to finance an ‘ideological’ cause on a battleground.

But what can the history of a people do against the history-building of a nation? Children can only chip in by dying; the elderly can participate by lamenting; youngsters can only find newer ways to be sacrificed; hospitals can only offer their buildings to the bombings; cities and villages and suburbs and ghettos and slums could only offer themselves to be ruined and desolated; human beings can only contribute by letting themselves be annihilated and forgotten. People can only create the reality of events and participate in them with their blood, but they cannot decide whether the event merits inclusion in the narratives of ‘history’, and if it eventually does at some point, through which convictions. Those who write the history, do not suffer it, yet the sufferings remain as historical reality. 

I am not here to mourn how the rules of the world of narratives affect the realities of the world of events. I am reading a piece of poetry written almost a century ago by the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das. Das, one of the trailblazers of modern Bengali poetry, owned a powerful historical consciousness and a piercing sense of unbelonging to the mandates of time, yet the recursive presence of his fragmented self in the temporal order made him able to observe the dialectics of history through being. From the intuitional imperative of a poet, he experienced the material world passing into the discursive world of ideas via interventions of events that create motifs for the apparatuses they tether to. What he came to realise was profound. During the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century, he observed that the Nations that survived, and eventually manoeuvered the brutal instruments of modern civilization-building, had turned into persons, individuals. The desires and conjurings of a nation, as he realized, become those of an Individual; inversely: the people, citizens, as they collectively respond to the impulses of a victorious nation, operate as a singular organism. As a matter of fact, the people belonging to the ‘active’ end of the empire, the ‘subjects’ who withhold their subjectivity in both the order of narration and that of action, become one with the Empire. But does that mean that there won’t be any resistance within the empire, that there won’t be voices questioning the morals of the empire’s desire, criticising the path that the empire curves out of the flesh of the ‘object’s who create the material challenges to the fulfilment of his desire by simply existing, challenges that make the brutal pursuit of desire a legitimate political action, something of a magnificent price to shed blood for? Surely there will be voices of dissent and disapproval, but what should history be written of: the glorious desire or the profane souls calumniating it? 

Criticising the enterprise of history is not why I am writing this. These days, narratives of history are significantly contingent upon everyday representations of personalised reality in the media-universe, thus manufacturing both consent and dissent, reason and supra-reason. I am rather curious about the voices that come from inside the nation that dominates, a nation where people have become a person, the Person, as Jibanananda would assume. Ideas like ‘sovereignty’ as a unifying principle, and many such concepts trying to rationalize the political behaviour of citizens, who, by virtue of their animalistic design and spiritual inclinations keeps on attempting to depoliticize every smallest aspect of being where the world collides with the individual, could offer no explanation. What is sovereign in a technocratic state, or a religiocratic state, or, funnily, a state that thinks that these two complementary pillars of ideology are the only two functioning engines required to get the apparatus of governance to work? Moreover, history, the partial librarian of time who doesn’t grant everybody access to the ‘rare books section’, supplies proofs on the hypothesis that the right to rule has only been granted to those having ‘right to defend themselves’; and only those get rights to defend themselves, whose orbits of existence are deemed sufficient to constitute a ‘selfhood’ – those who do not even ‘exist’, mustn’t have a ‘self’. But this is not about the ‘people’ who only get noticed when they are killed. I was thinking about them, who are granted the privilege of a ‘being’, yet who speak against the desires of the Nation which is operating as an individual born out of the collective (un)conscious of ‘beings’ such as myself? For example, what do dissenting Israelis think, or where do they belong in the apartheid state that they have built collectively with the consenting subjects by co-performing willingly or unwillingly by the mandates of a political system fueled by hatred and abundantly funded by state-owned conflict-entrepreneurship?

But why am I interested in this? Perhaps, being born as an Indian Hindu and living through the current ‘state’ of affairs, I find my own position somewhat relatable. Amidst the jingoistic cacophony that strategically humanises the language of power in which Nations speak, what significance does my single voice bear, and hope to achieve? Moreover, how does one make the voices of dissent and rejection matter when his existence, the reality of birth, citizenship, and lived life, actually make him more visible than audible? How do I fight with my identity and my individuality at once? How do I save my existence from becoming an apologia for the power that flaunts its desires as my own, especially within the current of ‘historical’ time that validates such flaunting? How can I rescue my moment from becoming a tributary to the history of my nation?

 

Jibanananda belonged to the colonized India, whose urban intellectual modernity had quintessentially been a dire effort to negotiate between the zeal to realise the individual self as a voice of the historical and intellectual polyphony trumpeting in the western stage, and the nationalistic fervour that had spontaneously bolstered the Independence movement throughout the country. Yet the choice between becoming a world-citizen and a national-citizen was easier those days. The poet did succumb to that dilemma, which had made his thoughts disorganised and disturbingly multilayered, but it showed that there was a reflective resistance in his inner-world against letting his voice become the voice of a hegemonic system or that of a counter-system. However, regarding the issue of an individual’s voice turning into the voice of the nation, another side of the story should also be addressed. Is it also not true that the voices that come from the people who do not constitute the so-called empire, people who represent the occupied nation, may also create a vocal singularity that is organic yet representative of something close to the idea of a nation-person – a broken, brutalised, disenfranchised nation-person who is not able to function by following its traditions, by abiding by its historical values, by nurturing its economic potentials? The fragmented nation, then, fails to represent the desires of the people; it could only incarnate their memory. So, on one side, the desire-incarnate Empire-nation, and on the other side, the memory-incarnate Occupied-Nation, and between those two, intellectuals trying to determine whether the kindness of history would be bestowed upon the carcasses or catapults.

But, is it possible for certain citizens of the Empire-nation, those people who have declined the privileges of synchronising the individual desires with those of the Nation, to build up resistance against the desire-incarnate Empire-nation? What did dissenting German voices mean against Nazism? What did dissenting American voices mean against the invasion of Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan? What do dissenting Israeli voices mean against the genocide of Palestinians? How could I make my voice mean something when my country is committing crimes that I do not support, yet the ripple effects of that crime have enabled me some sort of indirect privilege? 

 

 

Perhaps the earnest solution would be to annihilate my sense of belonging to the nation and consciously effectuate it in the class-order. Similarly, the religious people would say that no religion supports atrocity towards fellow human beings, so invest in the true religious morality, the kingdom of God, and you’ll end up dissociating from the criminalities of the kingdom of men! The second option sounds silly, but a secular version of the second option has kept on emerging throughout history, a tradition that is still followed, and the latest version too pinpoints its essence to humanitarianism and liberalism. According to this, genocide, brutalization, structured efforts of ethnic cleansing, and subsequent destruction of nature could be stopped by replacing religious morality with a generous (multi)cultural morality and by depoliticising hegemonic political actions (so that the thrust to a ‘peaceful’ solution is not lost in the labyrinth of political debates) and making a representational appeal to the leftover morality of human civilization. This version is so much loved by the ‘ethereal’ netizens of the great beyond that they almost forget that the people for whom they are garnering sympathy are most of the time even out of the reach of the mass-media, let alone the internet. A political massacre could be averted or restrained simply by censuring the idea of politics, not by resisting the perpetrators – magics like these might have happened on those days when kings called for wars, and then, after enough people were dead, and enough land was conquered, they tried to stop being political and took recourse to religion, began to commission monuments, and promote high culture. But ‘calling for war’ days are over. Now we know that no one calls for war; everyone calls for self-defence, or a defence of democracy, and then some countries are wiped out and some people become refugees. No one wants a war, and everyone is in a state of war – the passive-aggressive political fort-da game of neoliberal civility is befuddling!  

Is the first solution, then, technically feasible? It could be, and class-conscious people who are aware of the exploitative mechanisms of world-systems should be able to consolidate a revolutionary camaraderie beyond their national or ethnic identities, but how can such phenomena be guaranteed to become the prevailing voice of history? In other words, how naïve is it to presume that the voices of class-collective dissent or even resistance will be recorded as the historical reality of our time? We read history by habit, we go through its great narratives every day and yet remain ahistorical, thus we are served the history that ‘they’ think we deserve, not the one we need. We have read the history of countries, nations and communities, which has not yet been replaced or won over by the history of the classes. Even if some efforts were made to constitute a history of people instead of making the narrative gravitate towards the empires and their stories, those efforts have only been considered as ‘notions’ and ‘perspectives’, not as voices of history. Moreover, does there still remain a possibility to constitute a so-called ‘voice of history’? The days have become more and more digital as we have gradually distanced ourselves from the comforting warmth of logos; algorithmically motivated stigma-building exercises, masquerading as discursive individual perspectives on time as human experience in the internet media, are leaving every day a profound impact on our sense of belonging to a historical time. The cherished notion of individuality, which has helped us develop the idea of the modern ‘person’, has given rise to a labyrinth of identities. For the last few decades, the battle for reclaiming disenfranchised identities and franchising newer ones, the cultural aftershocks of postcolonial liberation, has somehow been deluded by the emancipatory idea of fragmentism, which is more anxious about representative homogeneity than that of real exploitation. Now, the history of our time, if it is written at all, won’t be of empires or of peoples, but of our collective failure to constitute broader camaraderie, which could have sheltered some people who are in actual need of them and could have represented some people without drawing in narratives of affronting, eventually engendering more fractions within. During such a shattered time, when a broader class-consolidation – even on the lower strata of socio-economic order – may be disapproved as a [culturally] homogeneous narrative too grand to lead any liberating fight for people in the later-capitalist era or may be deemed unrepresentative and demeaning to smaller tenets of ‘axillary’ identities, how could a collective voice be generated to obtrude the traditional historical modalities? If a history of people is supposed to replace the history of nations, then how do we constitute ‘people’?

Routing back to Jibanananda, the poet, we ask now: who are still brave enough to remain ‘people’, not ‘persons’?

                                                                                                                           Ratul Ghosh

 

 

Photo Courtesy: Aruna Prakashani; The Telegraph; Aljazeera