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Arts & Letters

A WEARY HISTORY –Rudro Mohammad Shahidullah

The path that everyone has taken for returning I shall not go down that path.

Listening to the sickening song of disintegration, getting all wet in the rain The broken raft of Behula shall return in the belief of birth.

What will I take along?

From the fancy city will I take the love of a sharp woman?

Booze, meat, a pair of lips giving composed laughter, and air-conditioned love?

What I will take along!

From the brick-built world will I take the corpses of rusted humans?

Black money, forgery, go-downs of potatoes, and this impotent politics?

Will I take them along?

Rabindranath is confined in the shelf, while some paddy sheaves are hanging from the drawing room wall.

Ah Bangladesh! You are hanging – my golden Bengal!

Like leftover bones, you are falling flat on your face at the table where a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals dine with ignoramus leaders.

I know it is I who will have to pay off this debt; it is I who will have to walk a thousand miles with this debris on his shoulder.

I shall return.

But the path everyone takes, with a smile over their face, in the company of dear ones, down that path I shall not return; that path is not mine – I shall return with blood, sweat and debris heaved upon my shoulders.

I shall not return beholding green rice fields through the window of a train Or listening to Bhatiali or Lalon songs; I shall not return with a chest full of love, or the lure of songs in silence.

I shall return shouldering blood, sweat and the debris of time Like the last soldier, all alone, I shall return – a weary history.

Translated by Rifat Munim

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TRIB

Unsteady dreams of a new inte n Naeem Mohaiemen A Bangla prize fight

Our first sighting of Ali is inside an airplane, in wide business class seats. He is looking out the window, although the flight is not near Bangladesh yet. A moment later, the stewardess serves him a glass of orange juice. The officious British narrator, journalist Mark Alexander, sits next to Ali and tells the audience that he has the privilege of “accompanying Muhammad Ali on this rare pilgrimage” (Massey: 1978, 11:04 mins, emphasis added)1. We could consider Ali’s Bangladesh trip as a time-traveling version of scholar Sohail Daulatzai’s concept of a roving “Muslim International” (a different concept from ummah, especially in its reliance on African American experiences). But the careful viewer will catch hints of how Ali’s position within this concept had changed, as the fiery and transformative political possibilities of the 1960s gave way to the reversals and defeats of the late 1970s.

Before we can think of all this, the grating narration (“Bangladesh lies to the south of China”) has carried us away to Ali’s first encounter with General Ziaur Rahman at the Banga Bhavan2.

A few moments later, an official presents Ali with a Bangladeshi passport, making him the “country’s newest citizen” (13:27).

The dialogue that ensues is instructive.

Official: “Here is a passport for you…”

Ali: “So I am a citizen of Bangladesh?”

Official: “Yes that’s right.”

Ali: “Can I use this all over the world?”

Official: “Yes, you can.”

Ali: “Thank you so much. Now, if they kick me out of America, I have another home. Thank you.”

(13:58) In that moment, I wanted the camera to pan back, so we could see the Bangladeshi officials’ startled facial expressions. Ali was positioning his new citizenship as an antidote to his fraught relationship with the United States, especially after his refusal to fight in Vietnam. However, he was enacting this moment in a country that had very recently shifted away from a Soviet tilt and much closer to an American axis – an arc that began as early as 1974, but accelerated from 1976.

Ali had not properly understood

the nature of the region he was visiting, still dreaming of a Muslim International as inheritor to the idea of a radical Third World. In Bangladesh, Ali was seen as a global athlete. The live telecast of two of his fights made him one of the first global figures to have wide recognition in the country3.

His earlier opposition to racism in America, and overseas empires was largely not understood inside Bangladesh. Even if they had been, that position would not have fitted the distinct “tilt” Bangladesh had gone through by 1978.

Elsewhere, Muhammad Ali was a public figure who broke with the idea of loyalty to America, placing himself within a Muslim International, as when he told the listener: “I belong to the world, the black world. I’ll always have a home in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia.”

(Mike Marqusee: Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties. Verso Books, 2005.)

While Ali used the term “black,” he gestured at Pakistan, and later visited Bangladesh. He was aligning himself with a force outside America, something he repeats after receiving his Bangladesh passport. Black here was an isomorphism for an intersection between Third World and Muslim world. Elsewhere, “Black Britain” was already in use to describe the alliance of Asian and Black migrants against the common enemy of British racism. Ali was indicating a wider possibility, the black experience as entry point into a Muslim experience, and vice versa.

But Ali’s travels, and his fellow travelers, of the 1970s were sometimes at odds with this earlier position. The Vietnam war had ended in a dramatic defeat for the United States, and the White House was now occupied by Nixon’s antithesis, Carter. While Vietnam had been a clearer issue for antiwar protestors, the subsequent war in Cambodia hinted at more messy transnational conflicts with dirty shades of grey. The dramatic events in Iran and Afghanistan were just around the corner, and with them would come the last fading act of the Cold War (which had most clearly been played out in Vietnam). The clear lines of demarcation for an anti-imperialist platform were starting to fade by 1978, and Ali himself was enervated physically from a brutal fight regimen, and financially by a long exile from the ring. In

the coda to the Bangladesh trip, we find an Ali enthralled by the “new” America of Jimmy Carter.

The Georgia peanut farmers’ arc seemed to suggest a path of redemption for the American project (“I will never lie to you”).

A Black radical now shifted from a critique of the American empire fueled by experiences of besieged black bodies, to a new position of embracing American exceptionalism. Ali was now transformed from a “dangerous” member of a transnational Black network to a “goodwill” ambassador for the American presidency.

Bangladesh, I Love You

Let us return to Reginald Massey’s documentary Muhammad Ali Goes East: Bangladesh, I Love You, a travelogue that requires decoding of stage-managed images. The original documentary was made for Bangladesh’s business interests, with enthusiastic support from a government, and wide popular

support for the athlete. After a screening on Channel Four, and a command screening at the White House, the film company went bankrupt and the documentary disappeared into obscurity. A few years back, a VHS copy was recovered by the London-based Brick Lane Circle which hosted a screening of the film for British Bengalis. In this way, the film finally emerged and now circulates through a clandestine recording made by an audience member at that screening.

Massey’s biography says he was born in “Lahore, then in British India.”4 After moving to London, he became an author of books on classical dance in India. His website states, “Some of his books are standard works and used by international bodies such as New York’s Lincoln Center.” Approached

by Bangladeshi businessman Giashuddin Chowdhury in 1977 about creating an event that would “boost the image” of Bangladesh,

Massey proposed a state visit

by Muhammad Ali. The fighter was then at a declining stage of his career, having been beaten

by Leon Spinks in a humiliating match. Massey presented the Bangladesh voyage as a tonic that would re-energize Ali, because “he was still a hero in Bangladesh.”5 The trip was framed as Ali doing his duty, for a third world nation, which we see in his speech at the beginning of the film: “[I want to] help more people in the world to know about Bangladesh. One of my goals is to greet all my fans, and do all I can to help more people in the world to know about Bangladesh.

To draw attention to some of the positive things about Bangladesh, so much negative things have been said.” (10:00) From the first touchdown, the film is structured as an extended travel film, guiding the viewer through tropes of a visit to Bangladesh: the river cruise (the passing crowd in another

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BUTE

ernational Official: “Here is a passport for you…”

Ali: “So I am a citizen of Bangladesh?”

Official: “Yes that’s right.”

Ali: “Can I use this all over the world?”

Official: “Yes, you can.”

Ali: “Thank you so much.

Now, if they kick me out of America, I have another home. Thank you.” (13:58)

boat yells “Muhammad Ali/ Jindabad”6 (16:28)), the “golden fiber” jute (the camera lingers on two containers marked with destinations of Los Angeles and Savannah), the (already) endangered Sundarban forest, the historic Star Mosque, the Dhakeswary temple, and the Sylhet tea gardens. Along the way were other elements which were not particularly specific to Bangladesh, but were part of the “East” imagery that Ali was dutifully granted: an elephant ride, and, of course, snake charmers (“snakes are poisonous to all but the snake charmers,” (15:17)). Ali charmed the audience by speaking of his largesse (to the people in Sylhet he said, “Many people could not afford to come to Dhaka, so we came to see you,” 30:24) and his flashes of humor (he pointed to his wife Veronica Ali in front of a group of female fans and said, “The ladies in this country not as tall as her…” (29:50)) By the film’s end, Ali has been

given a passport, a plot of land in Cox’s Bazaar, and the promise of naming a stadium after him. He had performed a symbolic bout with a twelve year old Mohammad Giasuddin (later three times national champion in Bangladesh).

The state visit ended with a dinner where renowned Bengali singer Sabina Yasmin sang the special composition “Ali Ali.” (A decade later, Yasmin would sing “Shob Kota Janala Khule Dao Na” [Open All The Windows], anthem of the Ershad era). Two million fans had come out to meet him, trailing him everywhere on his trip. Driving along the Cox’s Bazaar beach with its “miles of unbroken beach,” Ali waxed rhapsodic: “we in heaven over here. You want paradise come to Bangladesh … eat at the President’s house” (32:05).

Ali had come to Bangladesh because the country “needed” him – because Massey had said his trip would help improve Bangladesh’s image, giving stability to a country that had been through a brutal

war and an unstable aftermath.

Repeatedly, Ali reminded the camera, “We never get the news in America about how beautiful this place is.” But it was also Ali who also needed Bangladesh to revive him on a psychic level, after his bruising defeat to Leon Spinks – a moment that signaled a physical decline from which he never fully recovered. The film does its best to keep the frame on Bangladesh’s place in the world, but in it Ali also takes refuge from a boxing world that has declared him a spent force.

There is irony in the champion fighter who opposes violence overseas, and we see it in the film as well. Speaking of Bangladesh’s potential as a beacon in the world, he says, “So much violence in the world, so much killing… [I’ll do] what I can in my power to tell people…” (33:00). Yet by the end, he is raring for a second chance at Spinks and finally explains why he has to wear sunglasses all the time. “[He] gave me a black eye! Can you imagine?” (50:39)

The idea of Muslim International

Ali believed in the idea of a shared history between the Muslim parts of the Third World and Black American struggles.

Bangladesh was perhaps to be an early stop in a global tour that would rekindle his connection with this transnational concept, just as his 1972 Mecca trip had done. However, there were several instabilities within this project, beginning with Bangladesh as the locus of the dream of a Muslim International that included a critique of the empire. While there were still sites of resistance to forms of western domination, Bangladesh by the late 1970s was itself seeking a deeper embedding within the Arab power bloc. This bloc, strengthened by the oil crisis, had moved far away from the non-aligned concept of the 1960s. The realignments of that period increasingly presented the dilemma of Third World leaders who were not in anti-imperialist positions. Journalist Palash Ghosh highlighted some of the more problematic sites of Ali’s world travels: “But Ali mixed with some questionable characters during his many overseas jaunts, including such bloody despots as Uganda’s Idi Amin and Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein (both of whom praised Ali no end).”7 Grant Farred, in the Ali volume of the series on “Black Vernacular Intellectuals,” (What’s My Name.

Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2002) makes a similar argument, stating that Ali’s presence could give Third World nations an “artificial unity.” Ali had performed a mistranslation that is common within the conception of the Muslim International. In this conceptualisation, every Muslim majority nation was a source for liberation theology and natural ally with black radical thinking.

Cassius Clay’s conversion to Islam had been received ferociously in America, including denunciation from icons such as Justice Thurgood Marshall (who called him “the ugly American)” and boxer Floyd Patterson (the “Black Muslim scourge [needed to be] removed from boxing”). Given this response, it is not surprising that Ali had moved into an emotional exile, seeking a new home in the Muslim Third World.

Yet, this journey landed the boxer into the public relations arena of a location such as Bangladesh, where a transnational Muslim identity was, at least in 1978, still highly contested and in flux.

Muhammad Ali was the exemplar of a defiant Black American experience, and he remained a contested figure until he was struck down with Parkinson’s Disease. Only in this debilitated state (recall his unsteady lighting of the torch at the 1996 US Olympics) was Ali safe for consumption by the American dream. In an interview, Reginald Massey told me that Ali had felt a particular kinship and warmth towards Jimmy Carter. Carter’s grandmother had employed a freed slave as a housemaid, and this made the future President “comfortable with black people”8.

I am unsure what to make of such enlightenment-via-housemaid stories, but it is certainly true that Carter reached out actively to rehabilitate Muhammad Ali. Perhaps it was particularly easy for Carter, since he had inherited the post-Vietnam zeitgeist of retrieval and redemption.

According to Massey, Ali showed the Bangladesh film in the White House and this resulted in a distinct warming of USBangladesh relationship and opening of foreign aid channels (which had been choked off during the Kissinger period).

Buoyed by the success of the Bangladesh film, Massey began work on a sequel, which would take Ali to India (although the Muslim International may have been Ali’s framing for his first trip, it was not where Massey’s interests

lay). Ali was flown to India with entourage, and according to Massey, charmed Indira Gandhi endlessly. He gave her a warm peck on the cheek, and quipped, “America kisses Mother India!”9.

Ali had traveled a long, strange way– the man who once said “the only solution to today’s racial problems is separation.”10 was now an ambassador for the postVietnam Carter era. Perhaps he believed, as many others did, that the Vietnam period had been a temporary malaise brought about by individual antagonists at the top (Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, and Kissinger). Jimmy Carter was supposed to be the corrective, but all that was soon to unravel with the twin ascendancy of Regan and Thatcher, and the beginning of the neoliberal backlash.

The looming superpower contradictions were brought to the surface halfway through the India filming. One day, while resting at the hotel, Massey received a direct phone call from the White House. After determining that the “Southern gentleman” voice on the phone was indeed Carter, Massey passed on the phone to Ali. After a brief conversation, Ali came to Massey and said: “Brother Reg, My President has ordered me to immediately fly to Africa and Saudi Arabia. My orders are to tell them all to boycott the Moscow Olympics because the Russians have invaded Afghanistan, a Muslim country.” (emphasis added) With that, filming was abandoned (Massey later said this contributed to the bankruptcy of the company) and Ali was on his way to Saudi Arabia, where he was warmly greeted by the King.

The Muslim International shifted away from the idea of being led by the Black experience to the centre of the Oil Bloc. Ali was now an emissary of the United States against Russia in the Afghanistan crisis, placing himself in the middle of a superpower battle. Ali did say “no Vietcong ever called me n****er”, and subsequent errors in political judgment will not diminish the courage of that lonely political stance. But in the span of a decade, the Afghan war was another Cold War staging ground (as Vietnam had been) with no possible benefit to the lives of poor or Black Americans.

Ali’s later experiences do not negate the potency of the Black International as a framing device for exploring Black radical  PAGE 18 COLUMN 1

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L I T E R AT U R E F E S T I VA L S

Feminist writers’ festival in Australia n Rashmi Patel

a cup of tea and get on twitter and abuse men?”

The video has over nine thousand views and four hundred likes. Social media abounds in such responses. Feminist writers are often inundated with messages on how and what they should write, where they are going wrong, and what their aims should be in expressing themselves. Even voicing that it is just too difficult to be a woman writer brings more brickbats than empathetic nods. In short, feminism has a long way to go in helping women writers write in voices they are comfortable with and still be acknowledged as equals in the literary world.

A more empirical evidence of bias on the Australian literary scene is provided by the Stella count, which shows the ratio of books by men and women reviewed in twelve major Australian review publications. It continues to indicate a clear bias by male reviewers towards male authors.

As Gloria Steinem aptly proclaimed recently at the Sydney Writers Festival: “Just don’t ask us if feminism is still relevant.” l This is a shorter version of an article that first appeared in scroll.in

W

hen Ryan Broderick, Deputy Global News Director at BuzzFeed, went about trying to find “social justice” literature at a London bookstore in a bid to poke fun at a male feminist, the only books that he could find for a pose were: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

While these may be feminist reads, the picture goes on to show that in your average bookstore you are not going to find an accessible stack of books written by feminist writers. After so many years of feminist writing, shouldn’t bookstores have more to offer?

Where is all the feminist writing?

The first of its kind... well, sort of The inaugural Feminist Writers Festival, the first of its kind as far as its name is concerned, has just been announced in Melbourne, Australia. This is not to say that it will be unique in terms of intended agenda and content, but surely there is no other writers’ festival with the f-word so prominent in its banner.

Panels that discuss feminist

Continued from page 17 thought. However, it does show some of the limitations of forms of racialized and religious essentialism that framed activism and alliances. By the mid-1960s, events inside America were also moving towards ruptures (assisted by provocateurs inside and outside the Black radical movement) that isolated Ali. Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad parted ways dramatically, splitting the strength of the Nation of Islam’s black membership. The fallout of this event was a distancing between Ali and X as well, which deprived the fighter from one of his radical

FEMINIST WRITERS’ FESTIVAL

writing have been an integral part of all major literary and writers’ festivals around the world and one needs to only glance at the international literary calendar to know that many local variations of women writers’ festivals already exist. So why a Feminist Writers Festival?

Cristy Clark, chair of the festival, says it all started with a Facebook post she shared in 2015, in which she wrote about her hope for a space to engage diverse voices of feminist writers across the country. She received overwhelming encouragement that indicated a need for a more

in-depth engagement with the scattered community of feminist writers which does not always get the support and visibility it would like.

Is writing the hardest job?

A few minutes of glancing through tweets of Australian feminist writers makes it clear that it is no easy feat to openly call oneself a feminist writer. One of the most outspoken feminist writers in Australia is Clementine Ford. On January 25 she tweeted a seemingly harmless line: “Writing a book is the hardest thing I have ever done. #homestretch”

In response, Youtube user Gary Orsum introduces the tweet by saying: “I like this one. This one’s f***ing hilarious.”

After displaying Ford’s tweet, he goes on to show the picture of a male sewer worker and addresses the worker: “Excuse me mate,” he drawls, “um, Clementine Ford’s having a pretty hard time of it. Would you mind letting her do your really cruisy job as a sewer worker for a week, while you take on the hardest job ever in the world of writing a book and stopping whenever you feel like it to make

Unsteady dreams of a new international political teachers. Once Martin Luther King started speaking against the Vietnam war and Malcolm returned from Mecca, fired up by the possibility of crossrace alliances, they both became too dangerous to be allowed to live. After their assassinations, Ali lost two mentors who could offer two polarities of incremental struggle or radical resistance. The 1970s therefore saw the waning of the idea of an International that could have derived energy from the African American experience.

The possibility of a transnational solidarity network was not only

ornamental but also political, independent and radical, and was eliminated during this decade.

Lawrence Ross11, in one of the obituaries to strike a contrarian note, said: “So now that he is dead, we have to ask the question as to who gets to decide which Ali voice gets heard and remembered.

Which Ali voice, the one that challenged America to be better, or the one that imagines Ali being the silent façade on which he could mean everything to everyone?” I know which one I want to honour and remember: the Ali who fought the colour line, and opposed the

destructive game of third world as chessboard (played by both the Soviet Union and the United States). He was a black radical who gave a generation the strength to resist and fight back. But it is also important to understand what combination of factors produced the later year figure– an Ali who would misrecognise the great game of the Afghan War (the origin point for many of today’s entwined wars) simply as the invasion of a “Muslim country,” stifling other possibilities the Afghan people held within themselves. These moments are unlike the man who once said,

“my goals, my own.” His later years carry both the weight of sacrificing his body to the sport, and the loneliness of an African American living on after revolutionary possibilities had been taken away from his people. l Naeem Mohaiemen explores postcolonial histories through essays and films. His essays include “Fear of a Muslim Planet: Islamic roots of hip-hop” (Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, MIT Press, 2008). Email: Naeem.Mohaiemen@columbia.edu

FOOTNOTES 1

All references to Muhammad Ali’s Bangladesh visit are from Reginald Massey’s documentary Muhammad Ali Goes East: Bangladesh, I Love You (1978). Massey left the production company after a disagreement, and the company itself has since gone bankrupt. The circulating copy is a clandestine recording made by an audience member during a screening in London. Time codes are of the pirated London recording. https://

youtu.be/OLpQQA9eEBU 2

3

For a detailed description of Muhammad Ali’s Bangladesh trip, see Mohammad Lutful Haque’s forthcoming Muhammad Ali’r Bangladesh Joy [Muhammad Ali Wins Bangladesh], Prothoma Publishers: 2016.

For a brief description of the impact of these live telecasts, see chess grandmaster Niaz Morshed’s

memorial in Prothom Alo, June 6, 2016.

muhammad-ali-the-boxing-champ 7

4 http://www.reginaldmassey.co.uk/ 5 http://www.indiaofthepast. org/contribute-memories/ read-contributions/theunforgettable/380-working-withmuhammad-ali-the-boxing-champ 6

“Bangladesh Jindabad” was by then a newly popularized phrase.

8

Ghosh, Palash. “Muhammad Ali In Bangladesh: 35 Years Ago The Champ Visited A New Nation In Turmoil.” International Business Times, 08/12/13.

10 Carpenter, Les and Oliver Laughland. “Shunned by white America, how Muhammad Ali found his voice on campus tour” The Guardian, June 5, 2016

Interview with author, May 11, 2014.

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9 http://www.indiaofthepast. org/contribute-memories/ read-contributions/theunforgettable/380-working-with-

Ross, Lawrence. “A Silenced Ali Was a Likeable Ali for White People.” The Root, June 4, 2016.