Content warning: Mentions of violence and war
The black hole forms in the unbearable summer of 1971. West Pakistan cancels East Pakistan’s popular democratic elections. Pakistan launches a brutal military assault on the University of Dhaka, killing intellectuals and students. My mother’s family doctor is murdered in the night; an aunt turned to superstitions of necromancy after being unable to cope with the disappearance of her husband.
Half a century later, I live in a land woven from country clubs and million dollar houses. I attend a top public university. I have never seriously worried about my next meal. But traces of the Muktijuddho, the Bangladesh Liberation War, still pepper conversations with my parents. Nothing can escape a black hole. My parents came to America for the promise of a better life, safe from insurgency and uncertainty. But even in a country where the roads are paved with gold, we’re tiptoeing around mass graves.
Recently, I found myself reading Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel, “The Complete Maus,” which details the author’s attempts to record his father’s memories of the Holocaust. As video essayist Jacob Geller points out, “Maus” is as much about remembering the Holocaust as it is the events themselves. Between gas chambers and Nazis, Art brawls with his father, Vladek, over various domestic disputes — chiefly, Vladek’s hoarding habit and his poor treatment of his new wife. In one scene, Art expresses doubt about his ability to meaningfully represent the Holocaust; if he can’t make sense of Vladek, how can he make sense of Auschwitz, something “worse than his darkest dreams?”
I question my own authority to tell stories about the Muktijuddho. I’ve been alive for two decades and have never even been to a funeral. To write about my own family history feels like grave robbing.
Interestingly, social psychologist Gilad Hirschberger argues that generational trauma is “not merely a destructive event, but also an irreplaceable ingredient in the construction of collective meaning.” He goes on to argue that collective memory of trauma is constructed by members of a group seeking to “inject meaning into history and provide a usable past.” Hirschberger, therefore, suggests that by finding meaning and group heroism in senseless tragedy, group continuity is maintained through a tragic historical event. Here, he borrows from anthropologist Ernest Becker’s idea that “man’s fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols.”
I have long been deeply proud of the role my family has played in the Muktijuddho — the resilience in the face of brutal repression, the faith against the odds. I have aspired to live up to that legacy by honoring it. Is it possible that this valorization of my ancestors is an attempt to prevent a crisis of meaning by maintaining emotional ties to a traumatic historical event? Theoretically, there is nothing wrong in finding meaning through family history. But what historical nuance is lost when we valorize group identity and generational trauma? During the Muktijuddho, Bengali freedom fighters participated in counter massacres, targeting Urdu-speaking Biharis. In modern day Bangladesh, Biharis live in derelict camps and slums, many of whom were denied citizenship until 2008. Urdu, despite having a centuries-long history in Bangladesh, is now dwindling.
It’s impossible to actually look at a black hole. You can only see the boundary past which all light disappears, past which spacetime completely collapses. In “Maus,”Spiegelman’s therapist, a Czech Jew and Auschwitz survivor, argues that “life always takes the side of life.” Since surviving is seen as a noble act, dying is implicitly an ignoble one; since the dead can never truly tell their own stories, maybe it’s better to have no more stories at all. But of course, Spiegelman did write another Holocaust story, a paradox he himself notes.
Nothing escapes a black hole. Returning to Grosse Pointe for Thanksgiving, my family discusses the war in Gaza the whole way home. My father has had nightmares throughout the past month; 6 years old during the Muktijuddho, I do not need to ask about what. Two years ago, when the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan following two decades of disastrous and brutal American occupation, my grandmother would randomly wake in the middle of the night convinced she heard machine gunfire nearing.
Grosse Pointe and Dhaka are not as far as they seem. Political theorist Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics to describe how political power dictates who lives and who dies — he argued that necropolitics has lead to the creation of “death worlds,” where the lives of vast populations are so cheapened that they are essentially seen as “walking dead.” The wealth within places like my home town, Grosse Pointe, is produced by, and produces, mass slaughter in deathworlds like Dhaka. Indeed, during the Muktijuddho, President Nixon wholeheartedly supported Pakistan’s military aggression. Senior statesman Henry Kissinger, who encouraged Nixon’s bloodlust, was even celebrated by Barack Obama’s government in 2016. My childhood in America doesn’t represent a distancing from my family’s firsthand experience with violence but, rather, a repositioning within an ongoing system of colonialist violence.
Forgetting my family history is as dangerous as it is impossible. Throughout history, the powerful have relied on regimes of secrecy and forgetting to hide their atrocities. In Belgium, for example, King Leopold II of Germany whitewashed his private conquest of the Congo as a charitable venture aimed at economically developing the region. Only once reformers such as E.D. Morel began interrogating this image were the true horrors revealed — such as mounds of hands from slaves who could not meet rubber quotas. When Leopold was finally pressured to transfer ownership to the Belgian state, he ordered the government to burn its records of the Congo, stating, “they may have my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did with it.” Indeed, until the publication of “King Leopold’s Ghost” in 1998, these atrocities were almost completely unknown by both the general public and even Belgian diplomats themselves. Remembering, then, becomes a necessary act of resistance and critical consciousness.
How do we remember our collective struggles in a way that allows us to develop individual identities, pursue universal justice and recognize the particularities of each situation without resorting to new tribalisms and cruelties? To do so means accepting the necessary coexistence of forgetting and remembering and thus, our own frailty. We cannot save everyone who has passed and will pass — we cannot even save ourselves. Rather than supporting the existential survival of ourselves or our tribes, we must support the ability of all to live genuinely and openly, not as living dead, but as equals.
Statement Correspondent Awmeo Azad can be reached at awmeo@umich.edu.