“14 August: Kis ki Azadi?”
Queer Zenana (Pakistani queer feminist anti-colonial anti-nationalist politics):
My grandparents are the only people in my family who lack patriotism. They are also the only people who witnessed partition, who migrated from Indian Punjab to Lahore a few days after the bloody subcontinent was split into a bloody India and an even bloodier Pakistan.
Nana Abu is vocal about questioning this new state-produced, army-generated nationalism that, according to him, does not at all resemble the spirit of those who fought for independence. Nani Ami on the other hand, is silent. She refuses to partake in these celebrations of oblivion, but she also does not correct our misguided understanding of history.
Nana Abu tells me that he finds it difficult to understand why his grandchildren dress up and sing and blow up crackers on the day that only revives traumatic memories of violence and hatred for him. It is easy for him to talk about how his cousin was shot by a Sikh man, and how his family lost all their belongings after their village was invaded by a frenzied mob. But his voice cracks and stumbles when he confesses how he was involved in opening fires on Hindu neighbors, on old friends. How does political rhetoric transform one’s desires, one’s attachments to land and people? I want to ask him this, but I don’t think he knows the answer.
Nani Ami says nothing. There is nothing for her say during partition stories. She was there, she was migrating along with her family, but her worth was murdered as Pakistan was born. Nation, state, army, Jinnah, Islam, Pakistan, all stood up to sow her lips shut. If they could, they would’ve sowed her vagina shut too, to prevent her vulnerable body from bringing shame on Pakistan. 14th August 1947: When my grandmother was rendered non-human. She was made into a mere symbol of religious nationalism that her brothers and uncles and the Muslim League could use for their own nationalistic purposes. Unlike thousands of other women, she reached Pakistan unharmed, untouched by enemy men. She was protected by the freedom fighters because her body was now suddenly Pakistan. They had to protect it –not to spare her of trauma and pain– but to satisfy their honor-obsessed nationalistic appetites.
During these partition stories, Nani Ami only looks up and nods when my aunt mentions how during the war, fathers were willingly burning their daughters’ bodies to “protect” them from rape. I want Nani Ami to elaborate, but she merely keeps nodding.
14th August 1947: When killing daughters seemed a more honorable deed than risking their rape. When different groups of independence fighters threatened each other’s ownership by stealing women.
When chants of La ilaha ilallah rang in the air. What such chants actually screamed: Pakistan ka matlab kya: land is more worthy than a woman. Pakistan ka matlab kya: escape oppression to create a more varied kind of state-sanctioned oppression.
14th August 1947: When Pakistan and India weren’t actually warring for freedom from anyone. They were simply competing to create more oppressions: who could marginalize more and more groups of people? The winner would get ample rewards from the capitalist global economy half a century later.
14th August, this year: We continue to celebrate the freedom of the heterosexual Punjabi patriarchal Sunni man but don’t give a fuck about Balochistan getting plundered by our military forces, or the Afghan immigrants losing their kachay homes at the hands of the state, or the Khwaja Sira folks getting killed and raped and forgotten, or the Ahmedi patients being refused treatment, or the women being shamed and mocked and molested and killed, or about the Dalit communities still entrapped in caste-based violence.
14th August 1947: when certain men fought for “freedom” but didn’t give a fuck about others’ basic right to exist as humans.
14th August 1947: When nationalistic men started to confuse women’s bodies with land. Raping women equaled invading land. Why does nation-incited zeal make men rape?
14th August 1947: When the air rung with low-pitched chants of freedom. Male voices. Male freedom attained by forcefully grinding Nation to Woman until the two merged into a new-found thing called Culture.
14th August 1947: When women were talked about only for the sake of political sensationalism. When women’s bodies were incised by border-making. When even the few progressive men like Manto decided to use narratives of silent raped bodies in order to shock and shame the mainstream, without really doing anything about the silence, about the rape, about their own male gaze. [Sometimes left-wing masculinity is just as toxic as majoritarian masculine nationalism]
14th August 1947: When many manly wars were fought: between the Muslim nationalists and the Hindu nationalists; between the Muslim nationalists and the anti-partition Muslims; between the Muslim nationalists and the Muslim left-wing anti-nationalists. But all these manly wars used women as symbols, as things, as property, as nation, as theories.
So when I talk to Nana Abu, I hear him talk of enmity between Muslims and Hindus, of the unjustifiable violence of both sides, of how war makes one mad. But I do not hear about the erasure of women. I do not hear about how all of this 14th August mess– the nationalistic mess the army reveres as a fight for “justice,” as well as the mess of anti-nation ideology that questions Pakistan’s warped purpose– erased (and still continues to erase) women.
This is why Nani Ami refuses to talk, refuses to cry. Perhaps she knows that if she cried, her pain would be misused to serve another theory of nation and culture. Perhaps she foresees how her narrative would get twisted into one of nation-land and Hindu oppression and la ilaha ilallah. Perhaps she understands that neither the Pakistani state, nor Jinnah, nor Manto, nor her grandchildren with their green and white painted faces really ever cared about her.
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