I turned mute for few days. I am mute still. You are listening to someone who refuses to speak much.
Because I have stopped posting on Rizwanur Rehman. I am silent on Nandigram. I am now contemplating on my silence. December 16: the CBI enquiry report on Rizwanur Rehman’s death will be officially put forward. Nandigram: truth is reduced to Babel’s babbles. Here are a couple of respected blogger-friends speaking on the situations as it stands:
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Arjun Sen’s Rizwanur Murder: Operation Cover-up Proceeding As Predicted
Operation cover-up in the Rizwanur murder case is proceeding as predicted. One will have to wait till December 16 to get the final verdict from the CBI: Rizwanur committed suicide because his own brother and Pappu betrayed him. An absolutely open and shut case. The victim killed himself because of his own family members.
Who says Ashok Todi or any of the Todis had a hand in all this? Who says the police threatened Rizwanur? Who says the Todis threatened Rizwanur? See how poor girl Priyanka’s life has come to a standstill since she made the mistake of falling in love with a boy who comes from a poor greedy family from another community only seeking to grab the riches of her oh so clean and pure father, the devout God fearing man that he is?
So what will happen now? The political mandarins, the great friends of the poor who had called for a CBI probe so that justice is done to the victim and his family and the “real” culprits brought to book, what will they say now?
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RadicalHypocrite’s Our corpses, their corpses, disturbing coincidences
Listening to all those news broadcasts is like smoking multiple cigarettes and crushing the butts in your palm, or putting fingers into the electric socket. It’s insane, insensible to seek meaning from news. But do corpses have their own stories to tell? Do corpses and bits of body parts cry out in pain in the middle of the night to be acknowledged as human beings?
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Even when nothing remains of them now. Even when ‘peace’ has returned to the fields. And even when the wounds on their bodies and minds have been burnt out so piteably that you can’t put a tongue on them or move the heartless bricks of a concrete city to something. But the corpses, the ashes, the remains of someone dear to someone do have voices and there’s something important that they’ll be telling us in whispers. Let’s wait for that.
And as the remains of the finds from the graves— ‘ours’ or theirs’— have been sealed in plastic packets, and sent for forensic interrogations to ascertain identities, and political affliations perhaps, there’re some questions I would like to share here, before the official results are officiously declared.
Nandigram had been the epicentre of a peasant movement resisting neoliberalism masked in red in West Bengal for the past few months, and since ‘peace’ has returned and it’s the party-time for pretentious self-criticisms on part of the government, I think we can look back to rethink what these corpses mean to us.
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Why have I turned mute? Well, to put it cryptically: I have my own Nandigram inside my head, Rizwanur Rehman regularly dies in the railtracks of my bloodstream and I have no inkling on who died and who killed. Probably I died and my hands are smeared in blood, simultaneously. There were times when I wrote journals of my being, regularly, in this blog. Past two months, I receded to the wings and I let the contemporary invade the stage. But still, when I screamed for Justice for Riz and the truth of Nandigram killings, I was painting self-portraits and I neglected those ladies whom I used to pay odes regularly in my blog on love. I thought love is such an frivolous issue during the times of bloodwaste…
Ladies. When Priyanka Todi decided to replace her flattened-out pictures in the stage with herself and started speaking, turning the stage into a huge family-melodrama, I halted, I stuttered. Because I started losing faith on the lady, just like I have lost faith on the communist party which rules my state. She spoke, like the party-speaks, in the father’s language.
I notice with disgust how the ‘top posts’ in my blog continues to be those on the above issues; because I am sure that my blog has also turned into a huge stage displaying melodramatic spectacle. Curiosity is not a positive drive when it does not lead to knowledge but a mere narrative. Narrative is not about truth, narrative is about a sort of pleasure of knowing, the object of ‘knowing’ is not always truth, the object is the distance from truth. Therefore you have the, I am providing the, pleasures of double whodunnit: what happened in Nandigram? Who killed Rizwanur?
Why ‘pleasure’? Because you are not Rizwanur. I am not Nandigram. The dead can never speak. The curious undead do not have access to truth. In this era of mediated truth, the more ghastly the little rectangles of the monitors and the screens, the better; because at least it assures that those images are not about me. Here I am couched in a safe distance. Look Ma, I am not bleeding! It’s only the screen which is bleeding.
But I was bleeding. For a couple of months when I was sculpting persuasive and polemic prose, I was sculpting my body with the chisel. I thought I was severing my pounds of flesh but then I understood that I was merely connecting instead of severing: I was hyperlinking news-items. I took a position and defended myself from imagined attacks that I am not on the side of truth. I don’t regret my position, but I have problems about my modus operandi.
I was quoting articles, archiving news, hyperlinking (hyper in the sense of ‘more active than the normal’). The way I hyperlinked to my posts and other posts, when I hyperlink, I can only hyperlink to existing and published posts, therefore I am always hyperlinking, formally, to the available past. I google-search, find pages ordered according to dates and relevance along with dates. But how deep in time do I delve? The perpendicular or the vertical depth of time is rendered lateral or horizontal through hyperlinking and here lies the problem.
My posts on Nandigram and Rizwanur were surfacing a certain crisis in writing history, yes, we were writing histories, and ultimately I stopped to a grinding halt. The lateral disposition of the hyperlinks never yielded the necessary temporal perspective. It became virtually impossible (pun? unintended) to hyperlink to the past in much depth. I know it is not impossible; but it is virtually impossible. It is symptomatic of the depthlessness of our historical imagination or the unavailability of the past in the cyber-world. Look at our posts tagged ‘Nandigram’. It is impossible to delve deep in the past, even few months before March 14, 2007. You might write about it, but substantiating it through cyber-evidences is impossible; no one reaches much deep beneath a certain layer. The past ain’t available. And truth is also not…
It was a frenetic engagement leading to nothings. The first event rendered me haunted with contemporaneity, but the second was another tyranny, also that of contemporaneity. Whenever I was writing about the latter I felt the pressure of writing about more than my life-time. My personal history was ushering in. I understood that though the media will twist Nandigram into the ephemeral contemporary, it is about more than thirty years of history. But a shorter attention-span of blog-reading, the length of the posts, the sheer nature of the medium never gives you that panorama of time. I was also wallowing in the lateral.
The postmodern is the era of the tyranny of the lateral.
The tyranny of the syntactical, in other words: the horizontal ordering of linguistic elements. It is the lateralization of available time, and time lacks depth, feels light now. The cyber is the world where forms are rendered obsolete, obsolescence is a necessary value to achieve to validate updates and versions. Postmodern is the era of the tyranny of the updated where the past is archived as obsolete, like a Windows 98 desktop.
So instead of the depth of time, of history, where past and the present will be connected to analyze or illuminate, here we have the lateral disposition of a stage or a cinemascope screen where a spectacle of current affairs is being played, always reminding that I am no Rizwanur, you are not Nandigram.
I am excited reading the following observation by a dear blogger-friend, and I am preparing a very long post contemplating on the following. I am taking my time:
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Naked Historian on Personal History
I recently read an article by the famous Carroll Quigley pointing out the erroneus nature of evolutionists feeling that humans have reached evolutionary dominance because we adapted the best to our natural stimulations. In reality, We have reached dominance as a species because we have created an alternate world to what we were naturally given. As early humanoids we were practically wiped out. Then, somehow we miraculously discovered that living in a world other than the natural world would help us at surviving when we were otherwise failing.
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