| 26 March 2004 | Friday | 04 Safar 1425 |
Stories pure and simple
Khaleda Zia's govt to go by April 30?
The Great Wall of China was built sometime around 221 BC. The building material was local, the construction techniques were indigenous, and, the wall in itself was based on the 'system of Confucius'. For these distinct reasons, The Great Wall unlike the walls that rose to fall in a matter of few decades, stands to this day still.
The Wall was conceived apparently to keep the XiongNu tribes away from the Chinese border. Confucius had a set of moderate values for his people to follow: never go contentious gentleman; create a stable society; maintain a certain level of excellence and don't strive for new successes always.
These and a few other ethical principles were confined within the Great Wall. Hence, the Confucius system, a civilized way of life and, the wall - with rare deviations and petty damages continues to survive to this day still.
Impressed with the success story of China Wall some ambitious countries are out to follow its lead. Israel, India, Malaysia and United States are the major aspirants to a walled-glory.
For India's wall, both Pakistan and Bangladesh with 767 and 4,894-km fences along the LoC in Kashmir and down to her north-eastern borders are the recipients of Indian courtesy.
Similarly, there exists a wall between the US and Mexico - 3,200 km of their shared border, 130 km is fenced only. To discourage frequent border breaches, Washington wants a 23 km backup fence, however, near the Pacific Ocean. So is the 20 km concrete wall in between Malaysia and Thailand to stop drugs and human trafficking. Malaysia wishes to extend it further.
Yet, the wall, the most ambitious wall in all the times to come or to have gone for that matter will measure 700-km when completed. A recent edition of Time has dubbed it a 'security barrier' in the West Bank - a $1.4 billion combination of ditches, towers, concrete wall and barbed-wire fences has sparked an international furore, the magazine says.
Adding that, the Palestinians protest that the serpentine fence is an illegal annexation of lands for Israelis that also manages to divide villages and farmers from their fields. So far, 200 km have been erected, the Time tells. It doesn't tell, however, how the life goes inside the area marked for the 'serpentine' fence.
Yet, it is logical that if nothing is well outside the proposed wall, then something must be terribly wrong within the proposed wall. Imagine a people who live in a constant fear of death - out to a market place means never getting back to their home or work.
Travelling through a bus implies it can be their last journey. Life in schools, colleges, and public places is as bad and as risky as the logic to build a wall around the unjust Israeli settlements.
Kicked out from their homes the Israeli government now aims to bar the Palestinians even from seeing their previous abodes. The impulse to build this wall is so acute that the state of Israel fails to appreciate the growing discontent from within its society.
Certain reports from Israel suggest, "Israel, a "home for all Jewish people" is not the home at least for the Jewish immigrants arriving from Asia and North African courtiers." Particularly for the Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Israel happens to be a wrong place to live in.
"Thousands of people to this day still have no homes and they live in old hotels and caravans. The Russian immigrants have discovered that in the USSR the health service and the education system had been much better than they are in Israel" pronounces an Israeli - a Russian Jewish, though.
The peculiar conditions in Israeli had made an Israeli to announce "most of these 'refugees' were lured by the Zionist propaganda in Russia, carried out by the Jewish Agency (Sohknut) that presented Israel as a rich and democratic western country where everybody could find their place.
They even talked about the "socialist traditions" of Israel. But for the great majority of the 800,000 immigrants who arrived in Israel the reality is somewhat different."
Of course, the reality is different; an Israeli told this scribe when in Paris. Nevertheless, he said: "You can agree that every agitation for immigration is provocative; in every agitation, there is an element of lie.
The emissaries of Sohknut (Jewish agency) promised you a paradise in Israel - they have played for it but you should decide for yourself, you always have an alternative to choose. You can choose whatever you want - always your choice will be the bad one."
Besides that, another Israeli said, "I also can criticize all what I see in Israel; but I should accept the fact that it depends on my social status... I can find good schools, better supermarkets, etc., etc." But the fact is, as he said: "here nobody will take care of social equality as it was (at least on the surface) in the former Soviet Union. You should take care of yourself. In this sense, I am living within my every day reality and not within my past or my virtual future."
One more Israeli though again a Russian Jew, summed up the talks: "I have an impression that everything collapses. At least in Israel; our defence forces is a disaster, local authorities and a government is a total mess, our economic system is a total chaos, our education is a catastrophe...What makes me worry more than that- humanistic values worth nothing than everything is a collapse.
The distress that the "Israelis" endure depict things are bad, a bit too bad for the Israelis themselves. However, rare allusions can be made to point that not all humanity is dead, not even in Israel.
A group of 435 daring Israeli troops (reserve) had signed a letter: "Courage to Refuse " in 2002. It stated: for continuation of the occupation, or, more precisely, for continuation of the settlements, we shall not fight the unjust war.
"The occupation is destroying Israel from within, it is destroying the Palestinians, and it is destroying those two nations' common future," those cooled gladiators, had thus to say in the message called 'The Courage to Refuse'. Since the initial 'refusal', a lot more people (cadres) are joining this group, the reports from Israel available on the internet at least suggest so.
Israel doesn't need to build a wall for the safety of its people with the money of American taxpayers. In case it does not know, the Great Wall of China was there when the Mongols had played havoc with China. A wall so great as The Great Wall too couldn't hide the internal weaknesses and people's poverty. One wonders if Israel's wall - a much smaller and a lot more unmerited - can give such a cover. No, certainly not.
Israel cannot keep its people united by selling a shared sense of 'victim' to them. What is the founding block of common Israeli identity - violence, despair, injustices or its in-house disorder that requires accepting the principles of pluralism inside and outside the wall.
Human curiosity questions its territorial bounds as well. Alternatively, may it muster enough Machiavellian courage to "do the injuries all together?" This, inch by inch humiliations that it so inflicts on the people of Palestine, which in turn backlash to its own people, whom it wants to coop up now, doesn't seem to work towards a respectful Israel in future.
Stories pure and simple
Shabnam Shakeel's debut as a short-story writer is a welcome happening. Not for the reason writers of fiction are so few in the country compared to the number of poets we have whose bumper biannual crops give no respite to gleaners of verse but the fact that good fiction, both long and short, is in such poor supply.
In fact even that passes for good with few exceptions may not be fiction per se but sermons or popular psychology or some pseudo symbolic junk or long and smart conversations that lead to nowhere and tell no tale or just so much autobiography, half- baked philosophy or maudlin romance.
Matter of fact to the core, Shabnam draws no lessons for her readers and avoids comment of any kind. Her account has a satisfying economy of detail that she carefully chooses to advance the story.
Not that it is any virtue to be brief in short fiction but avoidance of unnecessary information, which most writers like inept editors cannot help piling up, is the absolute law in both drama and in this genre of literature. Shabnam exercises this discipline with an ease one would think she has been on the news desk for long.
She saves the reader from circling in verbal labyrinths in which the author himself or herself is badly stuck. This happens when either the story is unformed in the author's mind or when the author does not know how to tell that; but quite often this obfuscation results from intellectualizing the material of the story or its narration causing the reader to yawn and close the book for the evening or for the remaining days of one's life.
The good story teller knows when it is starting to drag. Ishfaq Ahmad is one of our great writers but his most magnificent story, Gadarya, I submit most humbly, drags for quite a good length towards the end.
Na Qafas Na Ashiana is a collection of eleven very precise tales that may not all have been written with much art or literary flavour but possess that essential element of suspense or interest that makes a story readable.
And this element of interest is not some trickery of plot but the abiding humanity of the tale conveyed surprisingly without sentimentality. The world of Shabnam's stories is the stuff of real life.
There are these two wives the younger of whom has been contracted into matrimony to produce a son for the issueless household. But once that has been done, she is not to have any relationship with her husband. Then there is Lal Didi who half fills her bowl of rice with stones to show her father she was being fed well in her husband's house.
And Zarina the society woman who must keep up appearances; the lame girl who cannot run away like her other sisters from her greedy father's house; Dilshad, the sahib's old flame, now down with arthritis, wants a job for her illegitimate son; the Baloch prisoner who alone can guarantee the safety of his jailer; the pickpocket who dies without encashing a lady's secret; the Afghan woman who kills a man defending her honour only to lose it the same evening in a police station; the ayah who sells blue-eyed babies; the beauty who is a wet blanket in bed and the Christian girl the Empire leaves behind to brave it in post-Partition Lahore.
These stories pose no profound dilemma. They leave no mystery to unravel. But in each you encounter the touching travails of existence and how different people deal with the dramas of their lives.
* * * * *
THE PRISON WITHIN: The concerns of my friend Sami Ahuja are entirely different from Shabnam Shakeel's. It would not be correct to say that he writes but does not tell stories because his writing is very much an exponential narration of some nebulous event that is happening as it is being told, a kind of delirious commentary on something transpiring in his mind, and to that extent a monologue, a Shakespearean aside.
But whereas the latter used the aside to lay bare the speaker's state of mind, Ahuja uses the entire convoluted self-talk to befuddle himself into believing that the empty hall is listening. In his latest book, Qaid der Qaid, the impossible prose that he has coined for this purpose defies any sensible perception of what the author might be driving at.
The moment you feel you have caught the end of a thread, it snaps. It is not that Ahuja has no story to tell. He has stories enough packed in a single page that many writers would need volumes to explore.
But a book of stories is not an index of ideas nor is it a notebook. Ahuja constructs sparkling statements, his knowledge of words is stupendous but as Amjad Islam said recently, there was no harm in writing for wider audiences, in reaching out to smaller minds.
Khaleda Zia's govt to go by April 30?
Dhaka is rife with speculations these days whether or not the government of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia will be able to continue in office beyond April 30. The proposition is being discussed almost everywhere - from offices of political parties and the secretariat to clubs and restaurants.
Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's BNP-led four-party alliance, which secured a two-thirds majority in parliament in the Oct 2001 general election, has the mandate to govern the country until the end of 2006.
Although it is true that most people, including sympathizers of the ruling party, have a lot of complaints against Khaleda Zia' s government, the resentment has not yet reached a point at which the BNP's rival, Awami League, can succeed in toppling the government through agitation.
Then how the question of a possible ouster of the ruling coalition, and that too by April 30, has become a point of speculation? It all began last month, with Awami League General Secretary M. A. Jalil asserting at a rally in Dhaka that April 30 would be the last day for Khaleda Zia in office. Earlier, on Feb 12, Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina launched her "oust-the-government" agitation with a countrywide dawn-to-dusk general strike.
Initially, many in Dhaka took Mr Jalil's speech as a mere rhetoric. But different sections of society took pause, before laughing the prediction away, when the AL announced three more nationwide shutdowns _ on Feb 14, 16 and 28.
The speculation got a further boost on March 14, when the AL general secretary, at a "meet the reporters" programme, stuck to his original prediction that Begum Zia's government "will go by April 30".
Meanwhile, a former president, Prof Badruddoza Chowdhury, who was forced to step down by the BNP in June 2001, launched his own political platform on March 11 and two BNP lawmakers quit the party to join Chowdhury.
Dr Kamal Hossain, president of Gana Forum, launched another political platform _ National Unity Platform _ on March 14 while both Chowdhury and Hossain separately issued a six-month ultimatum to Khaleda Zia to meet their demands or quit power.
In the wake of these developments, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia came down heavily on her Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League. While addressing a rally on March 20, the premier alleged that the AL was out to invite "extra-constitutional forces" to seize power.
"When a military regime (led by General Ershad) seized state power by removing the erstwhile democratically elected government of BNP (in 1982), Awami League chief said (to the BBC) that 'I (Hasina) am not unhappy' (over the change)," Khaleda Zia reminded the audience. "It means that she (Hasina) was happy over the dislodging of an elected government," she interpreted.
Referring to Mr Jalil's forecast of the ouster of her government by April 30, Begum Zia said: "She (Hasina) once again wants to express 'happiness' of the previous sort. But her dream will not come true this time around. We are very much in the government and on the streets."
Earlier, in the previous week, Anwar Hossain Manju MP, chairman of a faction of the Jatiya Party and owner of an influential daily, Ittefaq, gave a similar interpretation to Mr Jalil's prediction.
Asserting that the situation is still not ripe to unseat the government by April 30, Mr Manju, who served as communication minister in both Gen Ershad and Sheikh Hasina's cabinet, told a rally that his party would "not support any extra-constitutional move by any quarter" _ a clear reference to the armed forces.
Khaleda Zia's warning or Manju's interpretation could not force a rethink on Mr Jalil's part. "None can prevent the fall of the government by April 30, except Allah," the AL secretary general told journalists the day after Khaleda Zia accused his party of conspiring to "unconstitutionally topple" her government.
Mr Jalil, however, rejected Khaleda Zia's allegation that the Awami League would support a military takeover. Meanwhile, the ruling BNP has announced that the party will hold a public meeting at the Paltan Maidan on May 1 _ the day after Jalil's deadline expires on April 30. But Mr Jalil asserts that Khaleda Zia will address the rally as "former prime minister, not as an incumbent one".