Reviews from Syed Badrul Ahsan
Waiting for the son who went to war . . .
Anisul Hoque gives us back our history, or our sense of it. In Freedom's Mother, it is powerful fiction that he weaves out of the twilight struggle Bengalis went through in 1971. And yet it is not fiction. The narrative transcends fiction, for its roots lie in the realities which shaped the war against Pakistan more than four decades ago. In this work, the symbolism is what matters, for in Safia Begum comes alive the story of all the mothers who paid a terrible price in the struggle for liberty, who found themselves facing squarely a conflict not of their making. With three million people dead, with more than two hundred thousand Bengali women raped by the Pakistan army, Bangladesh's history thrives on a scale of epic proportions. And it does so in newer flashes of light because Anisul Hoque, through the eternity of suffering that Safia Begum goes through in 1971 and in the subsequent fourteen years, has pushed us into a remembrance of the parents who, deep in the rural interior of this land, have waited for years on end in the expectation that their sons will return home in the light of the stars. It did not matter that the war ended years ago. Neither did it matter that for a new generation unable or unwilling to recall the history of the preceding generation, life was beginning to be dominated by thoughts of a quotidian nature. Those who had sent off their sons to the war did not know or did not acknowledge the thought that those children would not return home, because they would fall on the battlefield. They waited, looking out in expectation at the path stretching away from the village. Those children went away in the darkness of the night to seize the sun, as a poignant song notes. Indeed, the sun did rise on a tormented country. Only, many of the children who seized the sun did not come home. Azad, not just a name but a symbol of liberty, did not come home. The convoluted logic upon which the enemy worked in 1971 dictated that he would not come home, that Bangladesh's freedom fighters or for that matter Bengalis of any class or category seized by the Pakistan occupation army would end up dying a gory death in blood-drenched cantonments. In the perspective of history, young men like Azad and Rumi, soldiers focused on urban guerrilla operations, would simply disappear. These two young men, along with thousands of others, have remained untraced. And that has only added to their mystique, year after year, to a point where every celebration of Bangladesh, every remembrance of the war is in truth a reshaping of the idea of martyrdom. Azad is a martyr. So is Rumi. So is Rumi's father, tortured enough by the Pakistanis to succumb to death only a couple of days prior to the liberation of the country. But is martyrdom necessarily a prerogative of those who die in the defence of their country? The answer ought to come through a focused study of the sheer helplessness mothers like Safia Begum and Jahanara Imam were put through in 1971. Safia Begum's is a tale that breaks the heart. She slept on the floor, she did not touch rice --- for all of the fourteen years she survived the disappearance of her son. In an era when values mattered, when Bengali mothers held fast to thoughts of their children being their entire world, Safia Begum was emblematic of all these positivist images in society. She saw her bloodied, bruised son lying on the floor in military custody; she could not give him the rice he wanted to eat. And therefore came that huge sacrifice. Sleeping on the floor, not eating rice were how Azad's mother marginalized herself. Hers had been a shrinking world since the day she abandoned her wayward husband and yet she forged a new world in Azad. Freedom's Mother is in its deepest meaning the lonely war an ageing woman faces in a world that has little time for her. By the laws of nature, this woman should have turned into a wreck years before her death, perhaps sometime after she took her son by the hand and walked out of Yunus Chowdhury's affluent society. But something of pride, of hauteur if you will, kept her going. There was a spirit in her which was infectious, which brimmed over with optimism. Even as politics went into a state of turmoil in the 1960s and nationalism was beginning to wrench Bengali society away from its unnatural links with Pakistan, Safia Begum knew it was a fairly comfortable world she inhabited with her son. And then 1971 changed her, changed everyone. Azad and his friends, all urbanized and therefore in tune with modernity, none of whom ever imagined that a war would descend on them and leave their lives changed for good, went through a transformation along with the rest of the nation. Freedom is always a transformative affair; and because it is, it left Bangladesh better off than it was when it was part of the Pakistani communal dispensation. On an individual level, a political-military struggle of the kind Bangladesh's people went through in 1971 often leaves lives scarred beyond recognition. For Azad and Rumi, life came to a quick, sudden end. For Bodi, Kazi Kamal, Shahidullah Khan Badal, Ashraful and all the others, radicalization stepped into what till the eve of the inauguration of genocide by Pakistan had been a scene of relative serenity, depending on how you look at it. In Freedom's Mother comes encompassed the story of a generation that went to war, of a nation which felt the sheer necessity of breaking away from the negativism in which it had wallowed for close to a quarter of a century. Anisul Hoque narrates the tale almost in the manner of poetry, which is just as well. Even so, some glitches could have been avoided. It was not Sergeant Fazlul Haque but Sergeant Zahurul Haque who was killed in Dhaka cantonment in February 1969; Ayub Khan did not quit on 24 March 1969 but a day later; the scheduled session of the national assembly was called off by General Yahya Khan on March 1, 1971 rather than 26 February; Tikka Khan did not fly down to Dhaka on March 7 but on March 6; the talks between Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto were held not at Hotel Intercontinental but at President's House (which, post-1971, would become Ganobhavan).
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