Photography
Forensic Echoes
Bark 2 by Shahidul Alam. What did the oldest tree at the small market see?
In the plains, the astute villager on the way to market witnesses the flash of the out of focus mongoose as it darts across the pathway. He sees and hears the bushes rustle and a mongoose shaped memory is constructed and stored in his mind. The memory he turns into sound when he tells his friend, who adds a word-memory of his own, easily etched into its own mongoose image. In thought and voice as much as in the dusty tracks of small feet on the pathway, the mongoose lingers.
Leaf by Shahidul Alam.
The hills meanwhile are the home of the echoes that reverberate seemingly into nothingness. But are echoes, once heard, ever actually gone? Or do they continue beyond the range of human hearing? Are they transformed into memories, to be spoken of later, to be turned into new sound and still new memories? And what of the hills, surely they store those echoes?
Nothing actually vanishes, not entirely, neither in the plains nor the hills. Not anywhere in the one Bangladesh or within the singular world. It's what science tells us.
The fruit becomes the seed becomes the sapling. The breeze-embraced dust will eventually, rearranged, settle. Everything leaves its trace. So did Kalpana Chakma.
Long cylindrical core samples of earth, meanwhile, geologists have learnt to read as books. These are chapters of climate variation and seismic fluctuation. Bones and fossils meanwhile, present as creatures to palaeontologists and seeds, deep frozen in a glacier are for botanists a wondrous forest. Scientists routinely demand the inanimate to speak of life, to tell of epochs ended and ages begun.
And as witness, recorder, observer and preserver, nature obliges the scientist. It serves to remind, not least, that the past cannot be changed.
Shoes 2 by Shahidul Alam. Once Kalpana came to Dhaka. She went to see her national parliament.
At crime scenes meanwhile the forensic scientists gather. There too the memories of the inanimate are grilled for evidence, cross-examined, entrusted to divulge. Dusting and fingerprinting, DNA sampling, scanning, chemically testing and matching, a scene is piece by piece reconstructed and events of interest are restored. It's routine.
Can forensic examination not be of value to a photographer and activist?
Shahidul Alam and Saydia Gulrukh sought to answer that question, but not to share answers as much as more questions, in their photo-forensic exhibition, Searching for Kalpana Chakma, at the Drik Gallery in Dhanmondi from 3 pm – 8 pm until 21 June 2013. Through their own forensic examination the traces of Kalpana Chakma have become photographs which then become the new memories and thoughts of those who go to see.
Ribbon by Shahidul Alam. Could it have once been used to tie Kalpana's hair?
But who was she? Well-known, Kalpana was a human rights activist for her Chakma people, the people of the hills. On 12 June 1996 she was abducted from her home, at night, and never seen again. There are suspicions of the involvement of Bangladesh Army personnel, in that critical year before the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord was signed.
They've asked important questions in those photographs like, what can a strand of ribbon tell us? What if it's a ribbon that comes from inside a thatched wall of Kalpana's house, from the very scene of Bangladeshi failure and controversy, from where seventeen years ago the outspoken young women seemingly disappeared? Was it a ribbon Kalpana once used to tie her hair? Does it remember her?
Forensic: the bark of the oldest tree at the small market near the house. It was witness to the reported argument with the main suspect, one Lieutenant Ferdous.
Forensic: the leaf from the jujube, the boroi tree, which stands on a small hill overlooking the waterhole where Kalpana and her brothers, blindfolded, were ordered into the water, it is said. The jujube and another with purple flowers were the last two trees known to have seen Kalpana. Along with villagers near and far, those trees must've heard the gunshots in that night's stillness.
Forensic: the log in New Lallyaghona Village that stays by the well where one witness says he saw Kalpana with her brothers brought and blindfolded. What does the log know?
Shalwar by Shahidul Alam. Kalpana bought a shalwar togo to Beijing. Nothing actually vanishes, not entirely, is what science says; and Kalpana's voice was surely heard by the leaf that became Shahidul's forensic paper image that through the viewer's eyes regenerates the memories and hopes of the people of the hills where the echoes linger. The images rekindle Kalpana's dreams for the rights of her people and particularly women; and that unfinished business of a nation that prides itself on liberation is forensically there too: the unfinished quest for justice. The continual striving for a Bangladesh of unity and equality, for those who are Bangalees and those who are not, it isn't a shortcoming. Searching for Kalpana is strength. Kalpana Chakma will never again walk through the front door of her home but she is not vanished, not entirely. She accompanies all those that care to consider justice and a better Bangladesh as they walk through the front doors of theirs.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments