Following is a guest post from K. Johnson, blogger at “The Bible As Is“
If I had to give an award for the best book that no one’s ever heard of (including my librarian), I’d have to give it to Mahasweta Devi’s The Mother of 1084.
Here’s a brief synopsis:
The novel follows Sujata, wealthy mother of a failed revolutionary named Brati.It takes place exactly two years after Brati’s death and follows Sujata as she mourns her son and attempts to understand him better.
Sujata goes beyond grief as she discovers a deep sense of alienation from the world she has always known while investigating her son’s memory. There are no epic battle scenes or grand dramas, only a grieving mother trying to understand her son, herself, and the remarkably cruel world around her.
Each chapter is named after a time of day.
In Late Afternoon Sujata meets with Brati’s former lover and fellow revolutionary, Nandini, who is broken, perhaps more so than Sujata. She’s been blinded from torture after she was captured when Brati was killed. Sujata talks with her about Brati and the movement that they were both a part of. The conversation is painful as Sujata learns a great deal about her son that she never knew.
Their encounter is relatively peaceful. It isn’t an argument, but towards the end of the chapter, Sujata says something that triggers Nandini as they discuss the aftermath of the government’s squandering of the movement Nandini and Brati were both a part of:
“I don’t know whether or not I’ll forget him. I don’t know whether or not he’ll fade from my memory. But it’s not Brati alone. When I think, so many died, for what? Do you know what hurt me the most when I came out of prison?” [Nandini]
“What?” [Sujata]
“When I saw how everything looked normal, wonderful and there was a general feeling that the dark days were over, that everything had quietened down. That broke my heart.” [Nandini]
“But haven’t things quietened down?” [Sujata]
“No!” Nandini screamed, leaving Sujata stunned.
“Nothing has quietened down, it can’t! It wasn’t quiet then, it isn’t now. Don’t say it has all cooled down. After all, you are Brati’s mother. You of all persons should never say or believe that all is quiet now. Where does such complacency come from?” [Nandini]
“Has anything changed? No. Nothing has. Why did they die? What has changed? Are men now all happy? Have the political games ended? Is it a better world?” [Nandini]
“No.” [Sujata]
“Thousands of men still languish in the prisons without trial. And you can say it’s quiet now?” [Nandini]
In Nandini’s passionate exposé the flaws of pacifism are laid bare. Sujata, an upper-class woman has a radically different definition of “quiet” or “peaceful” than Nandini, a revolutionary and former prisoner.
In Sujata’s view, the dark days are over. The revolution has ended. The fighting has stopped. So long as there is no fighting, there is peace. But this naïve notion of peace angers Nandini who is stirred into a brief rant on this “peace” which is so rife with injustice. She points out that, though there might be no conflicts in the strict sense, there are thousands of men in prison without trial and that the liberties the revolutionaries were fighting for have not been won.
What kind of peace is this?
What we can learn from Nandini and Sujata’s conversation is that the problem with pacifism is that peace is not well defined. Peace as an absence of conflict assumes that all conflicts are equally bad, that no fight could possibly be a just fight. That the current state of affairs isn’t bad enough to change.
Another important point to note is that Nandini and Sujata’s relative position in the society plays a role here. The only reason Sujata is capable of being blind to the injustices that Nandini is screaming about is because she comes from a wealthy background. Sujata naively believes that the world is at peace because her world is at peace.
Things are quiet for her.
Nandini, on the other hand, has been to prison, she’s been tortured, and she’s seen her friends killed before her eyes. For her, there is no peace.
Those of us who want a peaceful world must be aware of this. It isn’t that pacifism is bad or that peace is some symptom of cluelessness, but defining peace as an absence of conflict is misleading and bound to breed complacency.
It can be easy to look around and see tranquility, but it’s important to ask – how deep does that tranquility go? Is my peace built upon injustice? When you scrolled through Facebook this morning, gazing at wedding photos or pictures of your kids/grandkids and felt an overall sense of rightness with the world, did you also think about the children who made your phone in a factory in China somewhere?
In a white-picket-fence-world, it can be easy to find comfort, a sense of peace. This is why peace is not a very good goal. Instead, we should be looking to create a just world, not a peaceful one. This goal allows us to go beyond calling for the end of unjust wars and into demanding the end of unjust labor conditions and the end of poverty.
Even if we lived in a world without war, we would still have work to do.
This lesson doesn’t just apply to global affairs, it also applies to personal affairs as well. In an increasingly political time, people often long for the “good old days.” In my country, this means the Obama years, when we had a nice guy in the White House. Many people have grown sick of this divisive era when social media seems to have become a metaphorical war zone.
While I certainly believe that our current president has made matters worse than his predecessor, it can be easy to think that this means things were totally peachy under Obama. They might have been for some people, but drone strikes skyrocketed under Obama, and unjust wars waged on in the Middle East.
How can we call these peaceful times?
The other temptation we might have in these increasingly divisive times is to simply avoid arguments. Politics, many people say, are tearing us apart. We need to come together again and stop arguing with one another.
Again, this sounds like a nice sentiment, but it assumes that there’s nothing in the world worth arguing over. And with 22 million people on the brink of starvation in Yemen, this is an incredibly privileged view.
Unfortunately, The Mother of 1084 does not offer us a glimmer of hope at the end. Sujata has lost her son, and his death was hardly earth-shattering enough to rock the unjust structures of oppression in the society that Sujata goes on living in.
While we are not given any hope, we are given a mission.
Nandini tells Sujata:
“Now you know that it’s wrong to carry on presuming that one needn’t know why or how such things happen.”
Thank you for sharing. My thoughts exactly.