If any of you have ever read One Hundred Years of Solitude, you might remember a part of the book where the assorted members of the Buendia family find themselves perpetually awake, the entire city of Macondo a victim of insomnia.
As the sleeplessness ravages the city, the inhabitants -- at first overjoyed at the extra time and energy -- slowly realize that each and every day they begin to lose their memory. The past becomes wisp and vapour, nothing that happened is remembered; in forgetting the past, the present becomes nothing but a recurrence.
This is a situation that should be eminently familiar to everyone in Bangladesh, especially those of us privileged enough to be able to read English language newspapers and have the time of day to pontificate about such weighty issues.
See, Bangladesh is Macondo and all of us have been graced with a far more useful and versatile form of collective amnesia -- we are blessed with the ability to forget tragedy, to obfuscate the pain and suffering of the thousands and thousands of horrible stories that we each have borne witness to, however distantly, over the past several years.
It is an alarming fact to myself -- as someone who has penned articles such as this for a number of years -- that it takes me such a long time to remember the names of those whose tragic ends have caused me, and I am sure many of you, a lot of heartbreak. There was the murder of Tonu which rocked the country almost three years ago today, for which justice has not yet been served.
There was the almost regular news of public intellectuals, writers, bloggers, and activists being murdered in broad daylight, and, again, justice has yet to be served. There was the story of a young boy who was murdered with the nozzle of an air compressor -- I will spare you the rest of the details.
There were so many many others, victims, the nameless faceless dead that greet us as we sip our early morning tea -- they greet us like clockwork, each and every day, like a butcher advertising his wares: Come one, come all, fresh horror awaits.
What is it about our collective psyche -- the national identity of Bangladesh -- that we are subject to such monstrous occurrences on the regular, yet are able to forget so easily and move on with our day to day lives? Is it the fact that the history of our entire country is one overflowing with violence, and that history of suffering is something which we perpetuate?
Our country was born in blood and fire, liberating itself proudly against foreign oppressors -- is it such that, without external foes, our ire is pointed inwards? Is it the fact that we live in one of the most overpopulated regions on the planet, that in a region where resources have always been scarce, competition has been high, and violence has always been the easiest way to move forward, to gain and to perpetuate power?
Look at the recent history of our elections, the massive protests that rocked the country, the firebombing of public transport in 2013, in 2014, and intermittently in between. For a smaller microcosm of the infection in our collective unconscious, look next time to a small but humble traffic jam in your local neighbourhood.
Each of these mini-dramas unfolds in the same way -- there is a traffic jam on a road without designated lanes. There is an incessant cacophony of horns and sirens, of expletives flying through the air like a cannonade.
Then you will find one person, always rich, always a little on the fat side, come out of his air-conditioned car. He will move through the crowd, taking sway of the situation before he starts slapping and hitting any poor driver or rickshaw puller nearby, coercing them with violence to move and attempt to fix the traffic.
C’est la vie.
Sometimes if there is a police officer involved, he will join in the fray, lending a hand (or a baton).
As a nation, we must be careful of the collective narrative that we are creating for us and our children. While our nation has a long history of violence, like the citizens of Macondo, our past need not be our future -- let us try and remember the names and lives of the ones we have lost to tragedy.
Zubier Abdullah is an engineer and a short story writer.
