(Sarah Anjum Bari on the Power of Visible Words)
Amar bhai ke marli keno?: Why did you kill my brother?
Past midnight on August 11, as my parents drive me to Dhaka’s Shahjalal International Airport, the city I call home seems locked in a tense quiet. No one has gone to sleep, our WhatsApp groups and Facebook feeds remind us—it’s been a month since Bangladeshis went to bed at a decent hour—but the roads are empty of both pedestrians and traffic police. The few cars and trucks passing through are shepherded by cap-wearing, whistle-wielding students, the streets somehow more ordered in their untrained hands. Entrances to neighborhoods are being manned by volunteer groups from resident families. Their stake out is a precaution against a recent surge of burglaries.
In this absence of Dhaka’s usual nighttime soundscape, what calls out to us on the roads are the red and black words streaked across the city’s walls, its pillars, shop fronts, gates, along the beams of flyovers and even the trunks of trees. At varying heights and in varying directions, we read, among other phrases:
Noy dofa dabi: A nine-point demand
Ek dofa dabi: A one-point demand
Dhaka, a city of corpses.
Sheikh Hasina is a murderer. Sheikh Hasina must step down.
36 July. No more lies. The dictator has fled.
We are free.
Since the beginning of June 2024, public university students in Bangladesh had been protesting for a reform of the job quota that unfairly benefitted freedom fighters’ descendants, thereby benefiting supporters or relatives of the ruling party who had fought in the war. In a national address to the protests, the (now former) Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina mockingly inquired whether the jobs should instead be allocated to “razakars.” By using that term, the gravest of insults for a Bangladeshi, she had compared university students asking for a fair shot at employment to collaborators who aided Pakistan’s genocide against Bangladesh during the ‘71 Liberation War. Students and their allies across the country were outraged. They poured onto the streets demanding both apology and reform, carrying slogans that now endure on the city walls.
Tumi ke, ami ke? Razakar, razakar. Ke bolechhe, ke bolechhe? Shoirachar, shoirachar!
“Who are you, who am I? The dictator says we are razakars!”
Chaite gelam odhikar, hoye gelam razakar.
“We came to ask for our rights, only to be labeled traitors.”
posted by f.sheikh