LaBong
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2010
- Messages
- 8,506
- Reaction score
- 3
- Country
- Location
The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Opinion | Regarding death
Afterwards, Gulam Mola would recall the night with horror — “Hai, ami ki dekhlam [Alas, what did I see]!” When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated on August 15, 1975, Mola had been the only journalist to slip inside the slain leader’s house and take photographs. He would never recover from what he saw. Just one photograph survives from that night. To look at this photograph, a trace of what Mola saw, is to replicate this sense of horror, over and over again. For apart from the pain and brutality of a violent death, of the thing itself, is the trauma of seeing it — a purely visual assault that profoundly affects the viewer. Images wield their own power.
In the image from Mola’s camera, Mujib’s bloodied corpse lies eternally slumped at the bottom of the staircase in his house. The familiar iron-grey helmet of hair is dishevelled, the glasses are gone, the crisp waistcoat has been discarded, his eyes are closed. It is almost intimate. As if the leader had been caught in a quiet moment at home. But suddenly, there is a stab of recognition. It is not just the blood. Maybe it is something in the yielding softness of the body, the awkward angle of the legs or the downward plunge of the steps. You know you are looking at death.
This must have been what Mola saw that night, all those years ago. And this is what must have floated before his eyes every time he thought of it, for memories often return as images. Perhaps the power of a photograph lies in the fact that it mimics the process of memory. In the absence of actual memory, a photographic image, if it is persuasive enough, may step in to take its place. And when memory falters, the photograph remains, a relentless reminder of “this-has-been”, to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes. The image of Mujibur’s body is not just a part of Mola’s recollection anymore; it has made its way into collective memory. Like Banquo’s ghost, the bloodied face of the leader returns to haunt us. The photograph will not let us forget. We have all been made witnesses. We must all mourn. The image has been resurrected, time and time again, to keep this terror, this collective guilt and grief, alive.
Soon after Mola returned to the newspaper office, the negatives of the pictures he had taken that night were seized by the army. But the negatives of the one that survives were somehow leaked to a Western media house. A decade later, Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, tracked down the negatives of her father’s picture and retrieved them.
It must have been a morbid memento. About a century earlier, the Victorians would take photographs of loved ones who had died. In these pictures, lifeless faces lie wreathed in flowers, mothers hold dead infants and stare grimly into the camera, little girls are stretched out on beds, their dolls arranged around them. There is a terrible, cloying sentimentality in such pictures. They speak of an obsessive need to remember, to fix a moment, to fix identity. The person in the picture lived and died and was loved — the photograph must be proof of that. It is a private grief, just like that of a daughter seeking out the last photograph of her father, needing to know him even in death. But Sheikh Hasina’s memento is a more savage one, and Mujib’s death changed the course of a nation’s history. Grief, in this case, would play a very public part.
When people bear witness to a traumatic event, they must choose how to remember it and how to deal with what they have seen. In the 1970s, a photograph titled Accidental Napalm became one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War. A small girl, her clothes burned off by napalm, tears towards the camera. Soldiers loll behind her as she runs crying out in pain. The impact of the photograph is heightened by a nightmarish sense of anonymity. There was no way of knowing, immediately afterwards, who the girl was or what happened to her. This image, which intensified public outrage against the war, has tormented collective memory for years. Decades later, the girl re-emerges in another picture. She now has a name — Kim Phuc. Her scars still show, but she is holding her child, a beautiful and healthy baby. Some viewers feel that the impersonal horror of war seems to seek its antidote in a private narrative of birth and regeneration.
With Mujib’s photograph, the private narrative of loss and grief has been projected into the public arena to generate reactions that are politically relevant. The picture was actually produced as evidence in the trial of Mujib’s assassins. The grisly image is complemented by pictures of a tearful Sheikh Hasina emerging from a courtroom after the judgement is announced. In November, 2009, five of the assassins, who were mostly from the army, were put to death after their last minute pleas for mercy were rejected.
Sheikh Hasina and her party still use the photograph in election campaigns in Bangladesh. The image of a man in that most private of moments — death — has been installed in a web of living political relations. It seems to urge the morbid sentimentality of Victorian mourning, the rhetoric of a heroic martyrdom and the apotheosis of a popular leader. People must not be allowed to forget what they have seen. For the collective guilt, grief and anger that this seeing evokes are potent agents of political change.
Afterwards, Gulam Mola would recall the night with horror — “Hai, ami ki dekhlam [Alas, what did I see]!” When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated on August 15, 1975, Mola had been the only journalist to slip inside the slain leader’s house and take photographs. He would never recover from what he saw. Just one photograph survives from that night. To look at this photograph, a trace of what Mola saw, is to replicate this sense of horror, over and over again. For apart from the pain and brutality of a violent death, of the thing itself, is the trauma of seeing it — a purely visual assault that profoundly affects the viewer. Images wield their own power.
In the image from Mola’s camera, Mujib’s bloodied corpse lies eternally slumped at the bottom of the staircase in his house. The familiar iron-grey helmet of hair is dishevelled, the glasses are gone, the crisp waistcoat has been discarded, his eyes are closed. It is almost intimate. As if the leader had been caught in a quiet moment at home. But suddenly, there is a stab of recognition. It is not just the blood. Maybe it is something in the yielding softness of the body, the awkward angle of the legs or the downward plunge of the steps. You know you are looking at death.
This must have been what Mola saw that night, all those years ago. And this is what must have floated before his eyes every time he thought of it, for memories often return as images. Perhaps the power of a photograph lies in the fact that it mimics the process of memory. In the absence of actual memory, a photographic image, if it is persuasive enough, may step in to take its place. And when memory falters, the photograph remains, a relentless reminder of “this-has-been”, to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes. The image of Mujibur’s body is not just a part of Mola’s recollection anymore; it has made its way into collective memory. Like Banquo’s ghost, the bloodied face of the leader returns to haunt us. The photograph will not let us forget. We have all been made witnesses. We must all mourn. The image has been resurrected, time and time again, to keep this terror, this collective guilt and grief, alive.
Soon after Mola returned to the newspaper office, the negatives of the pictures he had taken that night were seized by the army. But the negatives of the one that survives were somehow leaked to a Western media house. A decade later, Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, tracked down the negatives of her father’s picture and retrieved them.
It must have been a morbid memento. About a century earlier, the Victorians would take photographs of loved ones who had died. In these pictures, lifeless faces lie wreathed in flowers, mothers hold dead infants and stare grimly into the camera, little girls are stretched out on beds, their dolls arranged around them. There is a terrible, cloying sentimentality in such pictures. They speak of an obsessive need to remember, to fix a moment, to fix identity. The person in the picture lived and died and was loved — the photograph must be proof of that. It is a private grief, just like that of a daughter seeking out the last photograph of her father, needing to know him even in death. But Sheikh Hasina’s memento is a more savage one, and Mujib’s death changed the course of a nation’s history. Grief, in this case, would play a very public part.
When people bear witness to a traumatic event, they must choose how to remember it and how to deal with what they have seen. In the 1970s, a photograph titled Accidental Napalm became one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War. A small girl, her clothes burned off by napalm, tears towards the camera. Soldiers loll behind her as she runs crying out in pain. The impact of the photograph is heightened by a nightmarish sense of anonymity. There was no way of knowing, immediately afterwards, who the girl was or what happened to her. This image, which intensified public outrage against the war, has tormented collective memory for years. Decades later, the girl re-emerges in another picture. She now has a name — Kim Phuc. Her scars still show, but she is holding her child, a beautiful and healthy baby. Some viewers feel that the impersonal horror of war seems to seek its antidote in a private narrative of birth and regeneration.
With Mujib’s photograph, the private narrative of loss and grief has been projected into the public arena to generate reactions that are politically relevant. The picture was actually produced as evidence in the trial of Mujib’s assassins. The grisly image is complemented by pictures of a tearful Sheikh Hasina emerging from a courtroom after the judgement is announced. In November, 2009, five of the assassins, who were mostly from the army, were put to death after their last minute pleas for mercy were rejected.
Sheikh Hasina and her party still use the photograph in election campaigns in Bangladesh. The image of a man in that most private of moments — death — has been installed in a web of living political relations. It seems to urge the morbid sentimentality of Victorian mourning, the rhetoric of a heroic martyrdom and the apotheosis of a popular leader. People must not be allowed to forget what they have seen. For the collective guilt, grief and anger that this seeing evokes are potent agents of political change.
