Opinion Crimes of silence

The vice chancellor promptly ordered a probe by a senior dean who,after visiting the internet,discovered to his horror that al-Rubaish did have terrorist affiliations. He recommended the poem’s removal,saying that “students would not lose much if they do not read this poem”. One of the textbook’s editors explained that,at the time of the poem’s selection,there was not much material available online about the poet. They would not have selected it if the poet’s background was known to them.

It is an irony of our times that editors are being shamed for an intellectual act that was a creative way to expose undergraduates to the emotional impact of the “war on terror”. Who would dispute that the war on terror is a contemporary issue? How does literature react to it? Why and how do the Guantanamo detainees choose poetry to convey their pain and trauma? Most of them are non-poets. Can something they inscribed on coffee cups or floors of prison cells,in their desperation to speak,be accorded the exalted status of poetry?

“Ode to the Sea” is the favourite of Marc Falkoff,an attorney fighting for 17 Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo,who has edited Poems from Guantanamo: the Detainees Speak. He selects it as it is “striking in terms of imagery,metaphor and thematic complexity”. It doubles up as a lament and a complaint. The poet’s complaint to the sea for its indifference to the suffering of the detainees is also an admonition to the American people for their acquiescence in the acts of their rulers. This poem,along with others,put this uncomfortable question to the American people: is Guantanamo an exception to the democracy as practised by them,or is it its natural and inevitable product? At the same time,should this poem’s publication,with the Pentagon’s permission,be seen as a clever public relations ploy? Since poetry thrives in jail and is disseminated widely through such publications,can it not be claimed that Guantanamo is not an inhuman place after all,and it is unjust to compare this with the camps set up by the Nazis or Communists?

Aesthetes have worried if well intentioned publications like this one would not encourage an instrumentalist approach to poetry. Scholars like Homi Bhabha may see the poem as an attempt by the suffering to find a new temporality away from the one he is imprisoned in. Are such poems sensory monuments humans keep building to preserve their agonies,to deny humanity a reprieve or catharsis? These are questions young minds need to grapple with. They need to comprehend the enormous capacity of human beings to practise cruelty. They need to question the security their states claim to create for them by coming face-to-face with the eternal insecurities large populations are subjected to — through drone attacks or illegal capture of persons who are then invisibilised by caging them in Guantanamo.

Universities are meant to pursue the idea of excellence. Excellence is achieved only by training minds to be courageous,to wade into turbulent waters. This is why the University of Iowa decided to publish it. America is the fountainhead of the war on terror. Why does an American university have this courage and why do we lack it?

Even more disturbing was the Madras University’s decision to order its Department of Islamic Studies to cancel Wadud’s lecture. This was an attempt from within to expand the largely male discourse on Islam and could have been an occasion to foreground the concerns of gender,justice and equality in an Islamic vocabulary. One recalls how the will of the history department of the University of Delhi was similarly trampled by higher authorities when they decided A.K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Ramayanas” was not necessary reading for their undergraduate students.

The failure of India’s academic community to react to these “local” assaults bodes ill for the task of intellection universities were created for. Wadud asked in her tweet: “It is also a shame that Madras University went to so much trouble to be thwarted by factions of the ignorant. Where to intellectualism if that is so?” She exhorts us,“People of India,you have a chance to redeem yourselves for your own best interest. Do not be silent when the ignorant speak,claim your voice. And when one gives a service,one can just as easily stop giving. So that is my location,I am no longer willing to give to India.” It may all sound harshly unpleasant coming from a foreign voice,but do not we,collaborators in these crimes against philology and academic thought by our silence,deserve it?

The writer teaches Hindi at Delhi University