Memory and Genocide

On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation

Fazil Moradi, Ralph Buchenhorst, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Fazil Moradi, Ralph Buchenhorst, Maria Six-Hohenbalken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317097655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on the ethical, aesthetic, and scholarly dimensions of how genocide-related works of art, documentary films, poetry and performance, museums and monuments, music, dance, image, law, memory narratives, spiritual bonds, and ruins are translated and take place as translations of acts of genocide. It shows how genocide-related modes of representation are acts of translation which displace and produce memory and acts of remembrance of genocidal violence as inheritance of the past in a future present. Thus, the possibility of representation is examined in light of what remains in the aftermath where the past and the future are inseparable companions and we find the idea of the untranslatability in acts of genocide. By opening up both the past and lived experiences of genocidal violence as and through multiple acts of translation, this volume marks aheterogeneous turn towards the future, and one whichwill be of interest to all scholars and students of memory and genocide studies, transitional justice, sociology, psychology, and social anthropology.

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Intimate interrogations

The literary grammar of communal violence

Christi Merrill

Since the practice of translation remains radically heterogeneous to the representation of translation, translation cannot always be represented as a communication between two clearly delineated ethno-linguistic unities. Rather, it was this particular representation of translation that gave rise to the possibility of figuring out the unity of ethnic or national language together with another language unity.

(Sakai 2006, 76)

Elsewhere I have questioned the purity of the concepts that are put in play when claims are made on behalf of tradition, religious autonomy, modernity, or human rights. The translation of these concepts is not a matter of something external to culture but something internal to it. It is when a particular vision both refuses pluralism as internal to its culture and claims finality for itself in some avatar of an end of history that a struggle for cultural rights and the necessity to protect “our way of life” turns into violence and oppression.

(Das 2002, 107)

To open: the role of the interrogative in literature

“What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” Suketu Mehta asks a group of men about the Bombay riots of 1992–93. The answers proffered in his 1997 essay “Mumbai,” which appeared in Granta, are shocking, both for the vivid physicality of detail (“Oil drips from his body, his eyes become huge, huge, the white shows, white, white […]” (Mehta 1997, 103)) and for the revelations about the perpetrators’ motivations (“We met a pau wallah [bread-seller] on the highway, on a bicycle […] and set light to him […] I said, ‘When your Muslims were killing the Radhabai Chawl people, did you think of your children?’ That day we showed them what Hindu dharma is” (1997, 103)). Rather than seeking to distance himself from such acts, Mehta writes as an upper-caste Hindu raised in America to ask difficult questions about Hindu dharma and how this identity becomes part of the difficult project of nation-making.

The forms violence took in this particular wave of communal killings in 1992–93 were reminiscent of atrocities during Partition in 1947 and echoed again in the Gujarat genocide of 2002, which is the subject of a poem written the same year in Hindi by Mangalesh Dabral. “Gujarat ke Mrtak ka Bayan” [“One of Gujarat’s Dead Speaks”] is told from the point of view of an unnamed Muslim worker set on fire and ends by asking, “You who stare at me with shock and fear/what are you trying to see in my face/[…] Do you see my face in your face?” (Dabral 2013, 53 trans. Merrill 2014, 62). Given that both Mehta’s essay and Dabral’s poem trade in impossible questions about the relationship of “he” to “you” to “we,” the following chapter reflects from the point of view of Dabral’s translator into English on the intimate role of the interrogative in literature that attempts to rethink the grammar of communal identity a language away.

Mehta’s question

On the page, the conjured image is as shocking as it is alienating: “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” It is hard to move past the audacity of the asking – hard to understand in what context a question such as this might be posed. How could anyone possibly answer? And to what end? The interviews Suketu Mehta (1997) conducts took place after the Bombay riots in 1992–93 and so together the layers of distance – first his asking, then his writing, and after our own reading – create an opportunity for the English-language reader to reflect on the ways we collectively remember such incidents across borders. To ask “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” is to trade in generalities in the name of specificities and thus to risk reading a universalized moral narrative about genocidal acts and injustice into disparate local stories that attempt more complex gestures of memorialization. Yet these same layers of distance also provide the opportunity for a different perspective, one that might allow these complexities to begin informing the generalizations in a manner that combines the hermeneutic and the rhetorical – two twin acts Rita Copeland (1995) in particular reads as being as integral as they are contestatory within the Western European tradition of translation. I read Mehta as attempting a similarly productive tension, and it is this tension that I like to put into practice myself as a literary translator, especially when I am translating texts that demand contestation, demand renewed attention to specifics reshaping our understanding of the generalities. Here then, in these pages, I will read Mehta’s essay alongside my own English translation of the poem “Gujarat ke Mrtak ka Bayan” [“One of Gujarat’s Dead Speaks”] written in Hindi in 2002 by the contemporary poet Mangalesh Dabral and published in New Delhi in 2013, to look more carefully into the relational grammar adopted in narrating instances of communal violence in India. What does such an exercise teach us about the role of literature in coming to terms with genocide across languages? What do we understand our duties to be as we engage with the afterlives of these texts in translation?

In his essay, Mehta does not specify in which language he is asking his question, but emphasizes instead a different kind of translation – in the old-fashioned Latinate sense, recently revived, of carrying across – through an emphasis on place: first, the Mumbai of the essay’s title (1997) and later in the title of the book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), where a version of this same material later appears. It is significant that Bombay is the place of Mehta’s childhood that he loves and is forced to leave behind when his family moves to New York, and the place he has been struggling to come to terms with ever since. Throughout his writing, he makes clear that he considers himself both an insider and outsider to the city, and that these interrogations about the city’s confused communal identity are informed by internal negotiations over his own personal identity. Significantly, he leaves us to infer that he is translating conversations from Marathi or possibly Bombay Hindi into English and lets the reader’s interpretation be informed by the fact that the prestigious literary journal Granta where the essay appears is edited and published in England. While the essay is published in a special issue celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, it has more in common with contributions in prior issues of the journal that use an innovative blend of daring reportage and nuanced reflection to probe the difficult histories of communities around the world. In Mehta’s case – as is the case with so many other contributors to Granta – he does not view this difficult history entirely from the outsider’s view, but brings to the subject an insider’s knowledge as well.

At first glance, the grammar of Mehta’s interrogative sentence insists on a generalized, even universalized, “man” that can catch on fire and an equally generalized “we” implied whose members have in common the ability to discuss these atrocious incidents in retrospect because of the bare fact that we ourselves have survived. In translation, the question seems to assume a neat distinction between perpetrator and victim when Mehta’s essay as a whole leads us to blur the boundary between the two in order to call its very operations into question. Yet we might notice that in English the layers of temporal distance conspire with the implied geographic and linguistic distance and their colonial histories to suggest that perhaps the group of perpetrators and victims Mehta interrogates are distinct from those who witness these intimate interrogations on the page and that victims and perpetrators have more in common with each other, despite their overt insistence to the contrary. How are English-language readers implicated in the question, engaging with it, as we are, a language away?

What Mehta only alludes to, but which haunts the essay, is the repetitiveness of such stories. After all, the same question could have been asked of rioters during the turbulent times leading up to and following the partition of colonial India at Independence in 1947, when over a hundred thousand died and a million minorities on either side of the newly created borders – Hindu and Sikh on one side, Muslim on the other – were forced to flee further threats of communal violence in ancestral homes; the question could have been associated with the Ayodhya controversy when archaeological evidence, political machinations, and brute, mortal force were used to arbitrate whether the Babri Mosque was built over a destroyed Hindu temple marking the exact birthplace of Lord Rama; the question may well have been posed leading up to or following the televised destruction of that very mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, or perhaps in response to the Gujarat riots a decade later that Dabral writes about – a series of events which also happened to be connected to competing claims over the contested space in Ayodhya and which themselves repeat a variation on the various personalized traumatic histories of Partition. In each case, we hear tales of communal crowds dividing along Hindu-Muslim differences bureaucratized by the British colony in the nineteenth century, swearing oaths of loyalty, repeating similar calls for revenge, and even enacting the same tropes of violence that have been passed down through generations, with the same depersonalized descriptions: trainloads of bodies hacked to pieces, rumors of rape and abduction, government lists of citizens and their addresses, organized by ethnicity, homes ransacked and set alight, those fleeing or even stray passersby burnt alive. In the essay before us, however, Mehta is posing a different question to us, his readers who likely have not been physically touched by this violence, than to his interlocutor who was close at hand. What is the effect of these translations from act to internal reflection to secondhand testimony?

In Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, historian Gyanendra Pandey notes that in colonial accounts, communal violence is often represented as “the inevitable product of age-old animosities and deep-seated savagery […] the periodic expression of peoples unable to help their own barbarity” (2001, 108). The danger of the colonial stance is that it fails to account for the ways these divisions are reinscribed by colonial rhetorical strategies that set the ethnically defined community (of communal violence) against the notion of the nation (as Anderson’s “imagined community”). Pandey notes how often the tension is made to turn deadly:

Nations, and communities that would be nations, seem to deal with the moment of violence in their past (and present) by the relatively simple stratagem of drawing a neat boundary around themselves, distinguishing sharply between “us” and “them,” and pronouncing the act of violence an act of the other or an act necessitated by a threat to the self.

(2001, 177)

Instead, Pandey proposes investigating the ways “violence and community constitute one another” when representing violent events from the past (2001, 3–4). Pandey’s main interest is in moving beyond official narratives of the high-level political machinations that resulted in the division of the Indian colony into the Hindu-majority nation of India (ostensibly secular) and the Muslim-majority nation of East and West Pakistan (later Bangladesh and Pakistan). Pandey rethinks the grammar dividing “us” and “them” by investigating – pace Pierre Nora – how “private memories” and “individual histories” shape national identity, and consequently how a scholar might include details culled from oral histories, local newspaper accounts and literary memoir to write a “history of contending politics and contending subject positions” (2001, 11, 18). The fluid, contending subject positions and resulting emphasis on heterogeneity Pandey prizes find especially poignant expression in Mehta’s essay (even though neither seem aware of each other’s work) and thus require us to think more carefully about our own task of interpretation as readers at a geographic and linguistic remove, as a question of translation decidedly literary.

If we take seriously Naoki Sakai’s warnings that “the conventional regime of translation” posits a “putative homogeneous language community” on either side that suppresses difference, then we might understand how the tensions between the ethnically defined community (of communal violence) and the notion of the nation (as “imagined community”) become reinscribed in the postcolonial (and hence global) representation of translation (Sakai 2006, 74; Anderson 1983). Crucial to his formulation, Sakai understands community to be an ongoing translingual, transcultural negotiation: “Community does not mean we share common ground. On the contrary, we are in community precisely because we are exposed to a forum where our differences and failure in communication can be manifest” (Sakai 2006, 75). I read Sakai as asking us to radically reconsider our own readerly strategies beyond “the conventional regime of translation” in such a way that likewise allows us to rethink what Veena Das has called in an analogous context “the assumption that human cultures are translatable” (2002, 105). How might we read Mehta’s essay attentive to such dynamic heterogeneity?

When Mehta asks a group of Hindu men in the Shiv Sena (army of God) suspected of perpetrating horrific acts of violence during the Bombay riots of 1992–93 “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” it is important that his interlocutors are reading this “man” in communal terms. Rather than distinguishing crassly between the “us” that would never perpetrate such acts and those who did, Mehta uses the essay to reflect on the ways – in his words – “this divided city went to war with itself” (1997, 98). He invites us to blur the very lines between “us” and “them” so that we might use the image of this burning man to think more critically about key terms such as “unity.” That is, he is interrogating the use of language itself, including the divisions we apply even in our own seemingly private and exceedingly internal act of interpreting the sentences we read.

Before 1992, Mehta notes, Bombay thought of itself in the singular, as an island both literally and figuratively. And in some ways, he claims, it still does:

It regards the rest of India much as Manhattan looks on the rest of America: as a place distant, unfamiliar and inferior. The lament that I kept hearing – from both Hindus and Muslims – was that the riots were an ungentle reminder that Bombay was part of India.

(1997, 117)

Mehta also laments the dividedness of Bombay and interviews Bombayites, both Hindu and Muslim, from diverse walks of life to pose a more profound question – one he does not ask explicitly: How does a people previously inured to such divisions get so swept up in the rhetoric of killing that they themselves perpetrate these brutal acts? Mehta does not use the word “rhetoric” in his formulations, but I do so here strategically in order to signal what Copeland proposes as translation’s contestatory potential. In order to engage with Mehta’s stratagem most effectively, we must move beyond what I call – attentive to Pandey’s readings of colonial representations of violence – the rhetoric of inevitability and instead arrive at a more complicated understanding of the relationship between pronouns.

Mehta recounts the events of 1992–93 with literary nuance, referring at the outset to those days as “a tragedy in three acts” (1997, 98). Even when specifying ethnic groups, dates, and events, his treatment of, say, the first act (“a spontaneous upheaval involving the police and Muslims” that erupted on December 6, 1992, when the mosque in Ayodhya was razed) assumes a soft-focus distance that invites readers to see the players’ roles as more fluid than fixed and subject positions potentially interchangeable in a manner suggestive of Sakai’s notion of ongoing translingual, transcultural negotiation. Readers better understand the interrelated nature of the violence and its crucial connection to narrative as Mehta goes on to describe the second act, characterized – he writes – by “more serious rioting, instigated by the Hindu political movement, Shiv Sena, in which Muslims were systematically identified and massacred, their houses and shops burnt and looted” (1997, 98). At first, such a description reads like “the inevitable product of age-old animosities and deep-seated savagery” (Pandey 2001, 108) Pandey warns of. Nevertheless, Mehta refuses to keep the perpetrators of such violence at a distance and instead narrates their perspectives from inside out, starting with the third stage of violence he characterizes as “the ...