Lest we not remember to forget!
April 24, 2014
IN the months that followed the collapse of Rana Plaza, workers and labour organisations had vehemently fought the silent, but authoritarian actions of the government and BGMEA preventing the memorialisation of the site of the collapse. Security forces put up a barb wire fence marking the property line. Two-feet from the barb wire, another row of social fence was installed by setting-up shops to "rehabilitate" a handful of victims. Then, there were the political cadres who occasionally chased the missing workers' families away, or harassed the local or international journalist for hogging the site.
Labour organisations had fought fiercely to establish their right to commemorate the lives lost at Rana Plaza. Now there is a decontextualised memorial with a graven sculpture of the hammer and shackle erected there. Exhibitions are held with photographs hanging from the barb wire. Organisations had continuously used the fence as a notice board to raise demands, as well as to mark territories against each other. It became a complex site of contestation and complicity, but the day was rescued from slipping into oblivion.
On the day of the first anniversary, when we arrived at the site, in five different mics, members of different labour organisations were chanting slogans. The surrounding cacophony reduced workers' demands to noise bite. We were huddled together by a tent set-up for a blood donation drive. A grieving mother of a missing worker was insisting that the volunteers collect her blood. She was told to return a little later once the drive was officially inaugurated by the chief guest. An hour later, another grieving woman was turned back from the tent. She fainted; she was dehydrated but the volunteers at the tent did not have medical support to offer her help.
Later in the afternoon, we went to the Adhar Chandra High School premises. An eerie silence was blowing in the wind. A teen mother with her eight-month old son was sitting under the jackfruit tree where there were stacked up coffins. She was expecting their first-born when her husband was killed in the collapse. She took the overnight launch service to come to Dhaka from Barisal, spent the early morning (from 4am) trying to get some sleep at the verandah of the Savar Union Parishad. She asked us if we knew how long it would take for them to get the promised compensation. We had no certain answer for her.
Globally and locally, we have just observed another anniversary. Eclectic ranges of activities were planned from laying flower on the memorial to cultural protests at Shahbag. A series of human-chains demanding the punishment of the ones whose criminal negligence resulted in this catastrophe was held.
Bearing witness to this commemorative process, being a part of the larger movement, we notice a strange objectification of the grieving subject – deceased, missing and injured workers families. They are included in the rallies, human-chains, and all other activities to be exhibited; their grief, loss and stories of economic impoverishment has some currency to make a point, be it about compensation schemes or workers' right to unionise. Stories that fall outside of the discourses of compensation and workers' rights never get heard, like the man who refused to return to Dhaka to claim compensation for his missing daughter from the collapse.
Do organised acts of commemoration enforce a new process of organised oblivion?
January 25, 2015
Jostna, a young girl, lay on a metal trolley inside the morgue. We looked at her through the iron gate that stood between us. She was wearing a floral print yellow salwar kameez. Her aunt standing against the iron gate, softly talking to her, tears trickling down her face, "Wake up, Jotsna, wake up." She did not wake up. She was killed in the factory fire at Smart Expo Ltd on January 26, 2013.
On her death anniversary, our friend Waira Gintzburger sent us a photograph of Jostna. She was doing a follow-up story on the fire. In the photograph, she is leaning on a closed white-wooden door. Graceful comportment and a gentle smile kept our attention from all the other details. We looked closely. Holding a beaded fuchsia clutch, wearing a pair of golden chandelier earrings, an ornamental watch on her right hand – she was well-adorned. Here too she is wearing a yellow salwar kameez. "I asked her father," Waira writes, "if yellow was her favourite colour. He does not know." We will never know.
"Smart Export Ltd is still an abandoned building," she continued in her email. "Charred jackets from Zara or Bershka are haunting the building. No memorial march came here to remember the deadly fire and the loss of lives, like they did at Tazreen and Rana Plaza. No candles were lit."
We cannot but wonder about the media's obsession with "spectacular tragedies," when its attention to "ordinary disaster" like the fire at Smart Export Ltd or Aswad Composite Mills is either minimal or non-existent.
November 24, 2014
A few days after the two year anniversary of Tazreen fire, some of us went to the Jurain Public Graveyard to pay our tribute quietly. Unidentified victims of the fire are buried here. We have known them through their absence.
Grave number 1 is Jesmin Akter Sharmin. She was five months pregnant with a baby girl when she was killed.
Grave number 5 is Shahnaj. She had ordered a silver anklet from the local jewellery shop that she had never returned to collect.
Those numbers are not there anymore, but we know them by heart. Sabuj bhai [Shahidul Islam Sabuj] bends down and picks up a woman's torn shoe from the hole that was/is Shahida's grave. Now what remains of their graves are just series of grave shape holes and three graves with new tombs. We approached the manager of the graveyard and asked, "Why did you just work on three graves?" His answer was quite telling, "Labour leaders and others needed a pedestal to place their flower bouquets commemorating the anniversary."
We ask again, do organised acts of commemoration enforce a process of organised oblivion?
April 24, 2015
Two decades ago, it was not common to memorialise workers' lives at a national level. In 1990, more than 32 garment workers were killed in a fire at Saraka factory. A few headlines in newspapers and then the story was shelved. To fight against this forgetfulness, some labour organisations declared the day of the fire (December 27) as Saraka day. However, the day never gathered any attention outside the circle of labour rights activists.
Since the fire at Tazreen Fashions Ltd, we notice a shift in the commemorative practice in Bangladesh. All electronic media will run a two minutes package showcasing the suffering of the injured victims. The print media will do the same. National leaders would pay respect, send statements to the media houses. Tragically, it took the lives of thousands of workers and two decades to secure the right to be remembered.
However, we are slipping into a new form of oblivion. We are not just talking about the intentional or unintentional exhibition of the suffering victims, or the failure to take into cognizance the "ordinary disasters." We are concerned that the way anniversary events are organised, the emerging routine, ritualised acts of remembering are largely becoming another tool to make the observing actor's (government bodies, NGOs or labour organisations) presence marked. The name of the organisation written on the flower bouquet or the leaders laying flowers on the graves gives them legitimacy to speak on behalf of workers for the better or worse. For some, the graves of workers or the site of the disaster become a stage to ensure visibility, to earn social capital. The neoliberal global economy in which a moment of unimaginable loss becomes productive of social capital is another story that we will not venture here.
Lest we not remember to forget!
The writers are members of Activist Anthropologist.
Comments