File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0111, message 181


Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 09:06:20 -0800
From: "C. J. S. Wallia" <cjwallia-AT-indiastar.com>
Subject: Fwd. Terror in Bangladesh



 From today's ( 16 November 2001) Pioneer newspaper:


Title: The night of the lost nose-pins
Publication: The Daily Pioneer
Date: Nov 16, 2001
URL: http://www.dailystarnews.com/200111/16/n1111602.htm#BODY3


IN one night, nearly two hundred women were raped in Char
Fashion of Bhola, and amongst them were an eight-year-old
girl, a middle-aged amputee and a seventy-year-old woman.
They were raped in the paddy field, in the bush, on the
riverbank, in the house, and in the open field by gangs of
men, who had come to spare nothing in the village. It was an
open house for debauch men who were roused by the aphrodisiac
of extreme prejudice.

So the loathsome thing happened, and Muslim men raped Hindu
women. The village was sprinkled with the bodies of molested
women, numb with pain and shock in the aftermath of nightlong
abuse. They were beaten, bitten, scratched, pummelled,
dragged and ravished; the jewels of their honour despoiled
like the sanctity of an abandoned house.

Rape is to love what war is to peace. John Webster, an
English playwright, writes in The White Devil, "A rape! a
rape!... Yes, you have ravished justice; forced her to do
your pleasure." Maybe those men who attacked that night had a
predisposition. Maybe they had watched and coveted those
women for many days already. And their repressed desire
erupted one night after the elections, when they assessed
that those women were vulnerable. The coalition of carnal men
then went ahead and forced those women to do their pleasure.

But it is not rape that was so shocking about that night in
Char Fashion. Rape is when the biological force field between
a man and a woman is abruptly disrupted, and the sexual
tension turns into a sudden confrontation. According to Greek
mythology, even the gods in heaven could not avoid that
confrontation. Zeus violated Leda while camouflaged as a swan
and Europa in the guise of a bull. Poseidon raped Kainis of
the horse-taming tribe.

Thus rape is unequal sex between two individuals when the
ecstasy of one becomes injury to another. It is a crime, and
it is a sin. It is also a kind of mental sickness, which
afflicts only a certain kind of men. But above all it is a
storm that brews in the groin of man and lashes out in his
head, when the dust of lust blinds his soul, and he stoops
lower than a beast. It is the most intimate exploitation of
pain for pleasure, the rapture of the strong drawn on the
rupture of the weak. It is the violation of the unwilling by
the unwieldy, the art of lovemaking reduced to a savage
showdown between predator and its prey. Rape ransacks the
body of its victim and turns it into a wasteland.

True, the atrocities of that night left behind two hundred
wastelands, where shame and grief will stagnate for the rest
of life. But ultimately that is the problem of those two
hundred women and their few hundred relatives. For us, the
rest of the society, the problem is the wanton liberty with
which reckless men destroyed the last relics of decency. What
made them think that Hindu women could be mass-raped because
there was a change of government? Since when politics and
profligacy came to this deadly mix so that a shift in
people's mandate should make them horny?

Then one has to wonder at the cruelty of the whole thing. The
number of men who attacked was almost equal to the number of
women they raped. One of the women was gang-raped by eleven
men. Try to work out the permutation and combination of
victims and aggressors and you will be amazed at the
correlation between libido and hatred. It took so much flow
of seminal fluid before those men could release their
terrible rage!

Did those men come to rape because they wanted to hate, or
did they come to hate because they wanted to rape? Libido and
hatred are two of man's primal passions, and when they come
together in the force of violating a woman, sex hurts with
the impact of a catastrophe. It is difficult to tell whether
those men discharged libido to dispense hatred, or it was the
other way around. Did they go back lighter and relieved? One
would probably think so. But what about those women who were
hunted and dishonoured?

How did they feel being pinned to the ground when man after
man took turns on them? Did they feel sad for being molested
twice by each of those men: once as a Hindu and again as a
woman?

Some of the rape victims have compared their experience to
the loss of their nose-pins, while narrating their harrowing
tales. They must have said so because what they lost was an
ornament of womanhood. And it was a loss that may never be
compensated with the gains of life, because it singed
something very special in the hearts of those women. After
all, in case the rapists of the world didn't realise, their
victims are all made of flesh and blood and are no different
from their own mothers, wives and sisters irrespective of
caste, creed, race or religion.

To think of it, our society has lost something even more
precious. It has lost its ability to stand on the high moral
ground of civilisation where both gender and religion ought
to get equal protection. Pierre Louys wrote in his novel
Aphrodite in 1896 that the ancient Greeks didn't attach ideas
of lewdness and immodesty to sex. Sensuality, he wrote, was a
precondition of intellectual growth, mysterious but necessary
and creative. If a man doesn't feel profoundly the demands of
the flesh, he is not capable of encompassing the demands of
the spirit.

Neither holds true for the sleazy men who had turned into
monsters for that one night, because the demand of their
flesh had demeaned their spirit. They raped in the profane
brotherhood of atrocious sensuality, and they chose victims
not on the basis of their appeal but on the basis of their
faith. Child, old woman and the crippled, they spared none
from the brunt of their attack, which was driven together by
libido and hatred into the body and soul of their victims,
who have been shedding their tears ever since. Maybe that is
the only way they are going to have to deal with the scar of
their wounds, which might heal in the body but never in the
soul.

What about the men who inflicted those wounds? They have gone
back to their mothers, wives, daughters and sisters with the
calm of a storm that has spent its force. What will they do?
Will they ever feel guilty for what they did? How will they
cope with the love for their own women if the contorted face
of their victims flash in their minds? Perhaps the rapists
have a way to deal with it because they are different men.
For the rest of us, it is hard to believe that they were men
at all.


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