Date: Monday, January 17, 2000 6:03 PM
From: Mahmud Farooque <mfarooqu@gmu.edu>Subject: BUILDING BRIDGES:
Part III: When a Part Separates from the Whole: Exploring the Spatial and Temporal Divide
[... Continued from Part II]
In a 1964 book, Louis Hartz offered an intriguing analysis on the fragmentation of European culture and ideology. Hartz noticed that the ideologies in new societies formed by people of European origin took a different evolutionary trajectory than their counterparts in Europe. Looking at the liberalism of America, feudalism of French-Canada and radicalism of Australia, Hartz found a remarkable absence of the Enlightenment and the Marxist uprising.
Hartz offered a very simple explanation why the "fragment" and the "whole" tend to follow different paths. He believed that when the fragment leaves the whole, it cuts short the process of contamination at the point of its leaving. "When it leaves its first antagonist, it leaves all of the future antagonists that the first inspires. . Marx dies because there is no sense of class, no spirit of revolution, no yearning for the corporate past."
"Now there is nothing mysterious about this mechanism of fragmentation. A part detaches itself from the whole, the whole fails to renew itself, and the part develops without inhibitions."
Hartz's thesis can be employed to understand and explore the spatial and temporal lines of division between the resident, the whole according to his terminology; and the non-resident Bangladeshis, the parts or fragments of the whole. An example from our contemporary experience could help initiate the exposition.
I will return to the Jinnah debate in NFB, which I used as a point of reference in the previous section. What I didn't mention last time was why and how a seemingly intellectual discussion degenerated to mimic our run-of-the-mill no-end-in-sight religious and political debates.
It happened about the time when the frustration level on both sides became high and the arguments took a personal turn. An accusation was brought about, which questioned the allegiances of one particular writer. A very popular book on 1971 placed the accused on an infamous list of
collaborators, who allegedly had a part to play in the assassinations of innocent Bangladeshis during the war of liberation. As one can imagine, following that startling proclamation, the Jinnah debate steadily went downhill. It was thus no longer a Jinnah debate--it became a collaborator
debate. However, the lines of division in the collaborator debate remained unchanged, providing further evidence of the paradigmatic nature of the division.
Few months after that educational experience, I had the pleasure of visiting Bangladesh in the summer of 1998. Every opportunity I got, I tried in earnest to engage in conversation with friends and relatives drawing upon elements from the Jinnah and the subsequent collaborator debate. To spice up the pot, I even threw in hot button issues of secularism, war criminals and even Taslima Nasrin. To my amazement, I failed each time to generate much interest, let alone fruitful discussions on any of these subject matters.
I was equally dismayed when I inquired about a certain Badruddin Omar article in Desh, which was allegedly censored due to its unfavorable portrayal of Bangobondhu's role during the language movement. There was a Farhad Mazhar poem that was also omitted in the revised edition. I
distinctly remembered that incident because it was one of those rare occasions when the non-resident Bangladeshis were extremely quick and unanimous in issuing a signed electronic petition protesting the censorship. One can imagine my surprise when my friends and relatives had
difficulty in recalling the three-month old event. Though some reported a vain recollection of the issue, most of them actually had no idea about what I was inquiring about. It almost seemed as if we were in two different time zones, if not in two different planets.
Perhaps we were. In fact that is precisely what Hartz's fragmentation thesis will tell us. Being merely a part, certain segments within the non-resident communities are caught in a time capsule defined by the time and context of their separation from the whole. Secularism, collaborator,
Taslima Nasrin, and the two-nation theory are thus unresolved issues for the parts, not the whole. While the part had trouble accepting the explanation of an alleged collaborator who was physically nowhere near Bangladesh around 1971, the whole had no trouble appointing another with
publicly acknowledged anti-liberation portfolio, to the highest seat of the government.
It seemed that the whole had made peace and moved on; the fragments were still struggling to find themselves.
However, the struggles within the fragments were also varied in nature, which contributes to much of the discontent between one fragment and another.
First, being placed in different parts of the world, each fragment faced different kinds of antagonists and protagonists. As a result, there was and continues to be marked differences in ideology and cultural outlook between the Bangladeshi non-residents even among English speaking nations such as Canada, Australia, UK and the US. An interesting case could be
made looking at the different rates of diffusion of religiosity between the Bangladeshi settlers in the US and UK.
Second, the contexts of departure for the non-residents were different at different points of time. The precarious turn of events in Bangladesh will make the case that each new administration would go to great lengths to purge the inconvenient history of its predecessor. This meant that a
person escaping from the wrath of an administration would have a different but fixed mindset than the person whose maiden voyage to the promise land was a reward from that very administration. The marked differences of political opinion between those who left the country before and after 1975 would exemplify this form of separation.
Third, the fragmentation process was not necessarily a post-independence phenomenon. Those who were forcibly removed from parts of West and East Bengal in 1947 partition are much apart in their cultural-ideological orientation than those who didn't experience such uprooting. The East
Bangali in West Bengal and the West Bangali in East Bengal will always view each other as a natural enemy. To obtain a specimen for the hatred between West Bangali Muslims in Bangladesh towards the East Bangali Hindus in West Bengal, one can look up a Daily Star Article titled "Cultural Displacements by Imaginary Communities: Indianization of the Bangladeshi Cultural
Unconscious And our Interrupted Cultural Journey."
Fourth, the fragmentation profile fits best those who struggle to find an identity in the new land and hence have to redefine their existence. The moderately religious would suffocate in the Middle East but would be much at home in North America. The dogmatically religious would experience the exact opposite. Hence, the secularist would struggle in the Middle East, as the religionist would struggle in North America.
Fifth, the natural enemy for the fragment is a constant force that tries to balance though not necessarily fight its existence. In most cases it would be a fragment of the same whole that also migrated at the same time. So the natural opposition for the religiously inclined propagating the notion of a Muslim Ummah is not the atheists or the non-Muslims of North America. The natural opposition for them is the Islamic moderates who recognize the limitation of the concept judging from the failed union between Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Sixth, a fragment will tend to produce new enemies when its development will challenge the internal developments of the new whole. However, unlike the case with the natural enemy, the new antagonist will be a variable force that would change with the changing contexts, putting the fragment at varying odds. The US attitude to predominantly Muslim countries have varied considerably over the last three decades that translated into different forms of antagonism for the proponents of the Islamic Ummah at different points of time.
The list of six qualitative distinctions presented here is not meant to be exhaustive, but illustrative. Given these spatial and temporal separations of ideology and culture between one fragment and another, above and beyond the separations between the fragment and the originating whole, the idea of building an ideological or cultural bridge becomes an impossible proposition.
However, such impossibility is not apparent either to the whole or to the part. Hartz believed that the very nature of fragmentation prevented both those who stay with the whole and those who leave with the part, from understanding the pattern involved. The European who stays understand "an England in which the bourgeoisie carries the aristocracy along with it, a France where the two fight it out. But how is he to understand a North America where the bourgeoisie, having escaped both past and future, unfolds according to interior laws? On the other hand, the men of the fragment are in no better position: they are European in reverse."
Needless to say that the lack of understanding of the process and consequences of fragmentation, even when accompanied by the purest of intentions, leads to further exacerbation of the problem of separation between the fragments, and the fragment and the whole. The non-secularists
fear the secularists as the end of God. The secularists fear the non-secularists as the end of freedom. The non-residents view the residents as ideologically inferior and unable to solve their
problems. The residents view the non-residents as escapists who want to have the best of both worlds.
Given these outcomes, I tend to question whether we are actually trying to bridge any gaps or to validate our own choices and abilities to immigrate or stay back. That is because the bridge that warrants building is the one between a fragment and its new whole, not the one between a fragment and another or a fragment and its originating whole. Peaceful and respectable
coexistence of the fragments would appear as a natural by-product only when each one of them is able to reinvent itself in its new surroundings. According to Hartz, it is in fact the most practical
possibility:
"Being part of a whole is psychologically tolerable, but being merely a part, isolated from a whole, is not. It is obvious that there is a major problem of self-definition inherent in the process of fragmentation. . It is nationalism that is more difficult. What "nation" does the universal Puritan belong to? He is no longer completely English. Being English means sharing a community in which there are not only Calvinists but Anglicans. . How is wholeness to be recaptured? There is only one way out, determined practically by a bootstrap necessity. The Puritan must convert
Puritanism itself, the one thing he has, into a new nationalism which denies the humiliation of the whole."
Acknowledgements:
Hartz, Louis, The Founding of New Societies. New York, NY, Harcourt, Bruce & World Inc, 1964.
Siddiky, Chowdhury Irad Ahmed, Cultural Displacement by Imaginary Communities, The Daily Star, July 18, 1998, http://www.dailystarnews.com/199807/18/n8071809.htm#BODY2
News From Bangladesh, http://www.bangladesh-web.com/news.
USENET Discussion Group on Society and Culture of Bangladesh, soc.culture.bangladesh.
[... Continued in Part IV]