Arts & Letters, April 2018

PHOTO: COURTESY
Physical
and political
colonization
ended, but
colonized
minds are a
different work in
progress toward
decolonization
DHAKA TRIBUNE | SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2018 ARTS & LETTERS
man, that is, trying to push the white Englishman and his fellow countrymen
and women to find the good to be gracefully acceptable out of colonial carnage,
but actually apologizing for the behavior of our entire race/religion for
the carnage. This has especially been a reality in the post-9/11 world created
by the American Empire narrative – to which I will return later – as clerics,
imams and religious and community leaders in the US and Europe sprinted
to the first press conference they could find, unless they were invited to one
or passive-aggressively shamed into being there, following a terrorist attack,
(aka an act of violence specifically committed by a Muslim or brown-skinned
person), to condemn it and reassure everyone that not all Muslims were evil,
that Islam was a religion of peace.
Our passions were unabashedly running deep, the same as they would if
the topic of discussion had been the Bangla Language Movement or the Liberation
War, and the argument before us was that East Bangalis were a bunch of
rioting troublemakers over something as small as language, and East Pakistani
Bangalis were treasonous miscreants.
On August 1947, when East Bengal became part of Pakistan, one era of colonization
ended while another began. While an army of occupation would
not descend on Dhaka and East Pakistan with full and deadly force until 1969,
from its earliest months East Bengal began feeling the weight of inequality.
Jinnah’s declaration to make Urdu the state language of Pakistan was an opening
salvo that paled in comparison to the barrage of inequities and inequalities
that unraveled over the next two decades. Not only did then East Pakistan
effectively become a colony of West Pakistan, but also in keeping with “colonizing
tradition”, West Pakistan eventually marginalized Bangalis in a racially
prioritized hierarchy.
Whether this attitude would have developed over time without colonial
chicanery being its catalyst, as the conflict between East and West intensified
along the lines that eventually led to war and separation, is fodder for another
exercise; of relevance is the essential perspective that the wedge between
West Pakistan and East Pakistan, between Punjabi and Bangali, and Pathan
and Bangali, was a historical product of colonial training. It was part of the
race-based project of colonialism that was transferred from its original purpose
of subordinating dark-skinned peoples to their white subjugators and
reenlisted in the colonized space to create distinctions along religious, communal,
and ethnic lines.
By the time of the war in 1971, the mentality of West Pakistan’s government
and military elite had substantially absorbed the mindset handed down
to them – that of the superior ruler based on ethnic provenance, and thus the
natural wielders of authority and power over a portion of its population that
had to be controlled, if for nothing else but for their own good. Included in
this, in colonial fashion, was violence if and when necessary, notably embodied
in Yahya Khan’s statement of February 1971: “Kill three million of them
and the rest will eat out of our hands.” True to his word more literally than
East Pakistan’s Bangalis could imagine, Yahya Khan ordered a crackdown on
Dhaka on March 25, 1971, after which Bangali identity summarily got linked
with the quest to liberate the space for it, Bangladesh.
The bridge connecting Bangali identity to Bangladeshi sovereignty was
more a gradual construct than the inevitable end result of one steady continuum.
Unlike the chicken or the egg quandary, however, being Bangali came
first, without the necessity of belonging to Bangladesh.
What does that make a person of Bangali ethnicity and Bangladeshi origin
that moved to the United States and now holds a passport of that country as
well? The easy answer: Hyphenate it all. To what? Bangali-American? Bangladeshi-American?
Bangali-American from Bangladesh? Or, as most bureaucratic
paperworks offer in one fell swoop in the form of a box to check, Asian
(in which I have recently seen a further breakdown to specify heritage of the
Indian subcontinent)?
There is an easier answer. American. But I cannot claim that no matter how
much I have been “given permission” on paper by the United States Customs
and Immigration Service and the US Department of State respectively.
The age of the American Empire is unlike that of its British predecessor.
The United States cringes at the thought of the E word as vehemently as Britain
expounded the glory of its imperial might across the globe from the late
19th to the middle of the 20th century (not counting Hong Kong, which it officially
left in 1997). Colonized peoples under British rule were “members” of
the Empire, its sovereign subjects – however racially inferior – whereas Americans
of all stripes must do with a mere hyphen between their ethnicity/place
of origin/country of birth and American. The only exceptions are indigenous
peoples or Native Americans, and African-Americans. In those cases the communities
were respectively victims of settler colonists and their expansionist
rampage, and enslavement, which provided free labor for the building of
the US Republic. The so-called hyphenated American, therefore, is a feeble
attempt at drawing a distinction between subject and citizen, albeit with the
marked difference that calling myself American will not offend “real Americans”
(maybe a few) the way an Indian calling him/herself British or English
during the Raj would incense or baffle even the most liberal white Englishman
and woman.
Identity is complex. Maneuvering it is complicated. Navigating its intricate
pathways is at best enlightening, at worst completely confusing, together creating
the beautiful place of inquiry. There is no straight line from anywhere
to anywhere. There are only pathways, incongruent and numerous, that we
attempt to connect. By connecting them we may build as best a bridge as is
possible, a long and winding link propped up not by one single feat of engineering
but by a collective of multiple inspirations, which most certainly can
lead to the same place. Sixty six years after the Language Movement and forty
seven since the Liberation War, and continuing, Bangali identity and Bangladeshi
sovereignty keep meeting on the bridge of solidarity that takes them
from “Rashtro Bhasha Bangla Chaii” to “Joy Bangla.”•
Nadeem Zaman is a Bangladeshi-born American fiction writer. His first
collection of short stories is forthcoming from Bengal Lights Books and his
debut novel, In the Time of the Others, from Picador.
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