Sorayya Khan official website

South Asia Program Seminar Series, Cornell University
Text of Sorayya Khan’s Talk
April 17th, 2006

THE STORY OF NOOR:
SILENCE AND FORGETTING IN WAR

Well into the research for my novel Noor, I interviewed a person who'd retired from the Pakistan army as a Captain and was now selling insurance in Kohat, a tribal area some hours northwest of Islamabad. He'd taken the long bus ride to Rawalpindi after he'd heard that I was going to be interviewing a former group of people who'd fought in East Pakistan in 1971. In our first meeting, he was participating in a group interview along with seven or eight other men. When the other participants left the cramped room to smoke in the cooler night in the courtyard outside, he offered how his bunkmates had routinely brought back Bengali women and "had their way with them" (as he put it) in army camps in East Pakistan. It was the first time in any of my interviews that anyone had made vague reference to the rape that occurred during the 1971 war. I tried to let him talk, but he'd been talking for hours and hours, it was long after dinner, very late, and I wasn't as disciplined as I needed to be. I interrupted him and asked, simply, "Why?" He looked at me and without skipping a beat, twenty eight years after the war had ended, he said, "I've waited my whole life for someone to ask me that question." In the silence that followed and the stops and starts of what he went on to say, it was clear that he didn't have the answer, only that he'd desperately wanted the question to be asked.

I start my essay with this moment because, for me, it encapsulates the scenario of silence and forgetting that accompanies war. During the course of the twenty-eight years in which the Captain was married, had children, watched them grow, offered one of them back to the army, he'd been grappling with what he'd seen (and, perhaps, done) in the war. But like all societies that go to war, the society in which he lived could not bear to ask him what he had seen. It could not bring itself to ask him to explain why his bunkmates were behaving the way they did. The questions could not be posed because of the silence and forgetting that accompanies war. Without silence and forgetting, war might not be possible. Without true examination we could not send troops out to obliterate other populations or do the work of war and allow them to return into our fold, as fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, uncles. While silence makes perfect sense, it is also, I think, a great tragedy because it doesn't leave us with the possibility of learning more about who we are or why we are the way we are. It doesn't allow us, as the Captain and many others in my interviews seemed to suggest, to make peace with ourselves.

After one particularly moving interview, I recall walking from a restaurant into the busy Rawalpindi night accompanied by a former soldier to my car. Our interview had been interrupted by some phone calls from his wife who was caring for their five year old who had a high fever and needed medicine from the pharmacy. The man had three or four children, and this was his youngest. He'd already told me that even though he was still in the army (he'd reached the rank of Colonel), he would never allow his sons to join the army. He planned to simply forbid it. Outside, in the night, having shared astonishing things about his experience with me and having told me his story in such a tremendous way, I suggested to him that he ought to write his story down for his children so that one day they might understand his legacy. "Never," he replied. He said it harshly, but he smiled a big, open smile and I pressed him further. But surely his children would want to know how he'd passed three years of his life? He said "never" again; "no," he said he did not want them to know. Better to forget about it, he seemed to say, and move on. That's the silence and forgetting, perhaps, that makes war bearable and unbearable for those who fought in it.

Silence and forgetting need not always be framed in the negative. In some instances, silence and forgetting might be part of a healing process in instances of personal trauma. After all, there is life after trauma (if you're lucky), it does move on and perhaps silence and forgetting makes this possible. But the dimension of silence and forgetting that I was interested in exploring in my novel is the peculiar silence that occurs on a "societal" level. It's the way we behave as a society as a whole, the pauses and oversights in our conversations, the easy way most of us have of overlooking or talking around things that are too wrenching to discuss. This is not to say that everyone participates in this. Like the subset of soldiers I interviewed, some soldiers return from war and stay connected, reminiscing amongst themselves. But what soldiers can reveal and what they're prodded to reveal in larger society, though, is often a different story.

History is a narrative, just like a piece of fiction is. In fiction, the silences (at their most obvious) occur in the white spaces between paragraphs or sections on a page of a book. It is what happens off stage as our characters and stories move from one point to the next. There are some stories, in fact, where what happens in the white spaces (formless, shapeless silences filled with possibility) is more critical than anything that's "written." Silences such as these exist in the narrative of history-what they are, of course, depends on who is doing the writing. Very concretely, history textbooks tell us only one side of history. In Pakistan, for example, to this day local history textbooks provide only a sentence or two, if that, on the 1971 crisis that divided the country. Because Bangladesh was born out of this conflict, history books in Bangladesh devote much more space to the events and say something quite different about their Independence War. In Noor, I was interested in exploring one silence in this particular moment of history. I wanted to explore society's silence and forgetting as it relates to perpetrators of atrocities in the Pakistan army. While the victims of personal trauma have their own individual healing processes to endure, examining silence and forgetting as a larger theme seems integral to society's healing as a whole.

The conflict that provides the backdrop of my novel is the 1971 civil war between East and West Pakistan. In those days, Pakistan was one country, but a geographical land mass divided into East and West, separated by 1000 miles of Indian territory. The country came into being during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, its maps drawn by the British Empire. In the elections of 1970, an East Pakistani party won the most seats in parliament and the West Pakistani power elite wasn't keen to recognize this. The Bangladeshis call the ensuing 1971 conflict their war of liberation or independence because it is out of this conflict that their country was born. The Indians think of it as civil war into which India interceded on the side of East Pakistan. There are estimates that three million people died in this war. They died for the most part the way most people used to die in war in those days, in up close and personal ways, often having had terrible things done to them. That's what war does. It provides an arena for the worst of us to come rushing out. One of the landmarks of the 1971 war are the thousands of East Pakistani Bengalis that were victims of atrocities by the West Pakistani army, crimes that ranged from rape to horrible death. Some people familiar with the history call it a genocide, an event at par, in numbers, to some of the other genocides of the 20th century although it is rarely, if ever, grouped with them. In Pakistan today there is little talk of 1971 except as an example of how the Indians conducted business as usual in forever aspiring to dismember Pakistan. And if numbers of dead are ever bandied about, they are small. When General Musharraf visited Bangladesh in 2002 for the first time, an apology was tendered on behalf of Pakistan for the "calamitous events" that occurred during the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, and then he added, "But wounds do heal with time . . . ." But do they?

My first introduction to this war was from the radio. I lived in Vienna, Austria at the time and my father used to follow news from his country very closely on the BBC, VOA, and whatever else he could get on the old short-wave in our apartment. Shortly thereafter, my father decided that the severing of his country into two required him to return and help rebuild it, his protesting family at his side. In the summer of 1972, we (my brother and sister) were shipped to Lahore to spend the summer with my grandparents in a lovely, dilapidated remnant of a house that was a legacy of the British. Every so often, an older cousin or my grandfather's driver would take us various places and we would, inevitably, cross into Mall Road. What captured my imagination during those rides when I was ten were huge red banners strung from one side of the hugely wide avenue to the other: Bring Our POWs home. Who are these POWs, I asked my father and so he explained that they were soldiers who'd fought in East Pakistan and now were prisoners in India. I don't remember being told there were 90,000 of them and, of course, he didn't know they wouldn't return home for two and a half years. Despite the recent radio broadcasts that detailed the war, and except for these banners, there was no talk of this war and this, even as a child, seemed strange and incongruous to me. At the end of the summer, my parents sent for us and we arrived in Islamabad, our new home. My mother had already befriended another Dutch woman (another expatriate who'd married a Pakistani), except her friend wasn't as lucky because her husband, a soldier, was one of the POWs that the sign was calling for to bring home. She had three children, she didn't have a house which for various reasons had been confiscated from her in her husband's absence, and she lived in a well known, now somewhat seedy hotel in Rawalpindi called Flashman's. In the first year or two of our lives in Pakistan, my mother was forever pulling clothes out of our closets, exclaiming that they were too small for us, packing them in plastic bags, and driving them to Hamida's one room place in Flashman's Hotel for her children. This was our only concrete introduction to what war does to those left behind: it means you're in need of clothes or at least that someone thinks you need her children's hand-me-downs.

Besides Hamida, there was only one other reminder of the war in Islamabad and it was in the city's landscape. Islamabad, selected to be the capital of Pakistan in the 1960s, is a very ordered city or at least it strived to be. Streets are laid out as they were in an urban planner's grid with plots of identical size lining them. But the new city was peppered with several houses which looked as if one fine day construction had suddenly stopped. Half of balconies hung from these wrecks. Bushes grew into window frames never fitted with windows, cemented stairs rose up or fell down, never to reach the roofs or the ground. They were ghostly houses of which we were all afraid and one of them was a five minute bicycle ride from our house. When pressed for explanations, my parents told us that the houses belonged to East Pakistanis who'd been building them before fleeing for safety to East Pakistan/Bangladesh as the case might be when the conflict heated up in 1971. The ghostly, unfinished houses scattered in the landscape of Islamabad set against the gorgeous backdrop of the Margalla Hills was the legacy of a conflict that killed perhaps three million people (no less, however, than 300,000) in nine months or so during the fateful year of 1971.

It is, to be sure, a very small, slight thing to relate my rather insignificant introduction to the war. You may ask what a moment of personal history (a child's history at that) might bear on a discussion of history as a whole. You would be right to wonder at the arrogance. But perhaps it would help if I confess that I believe in the intersection of the personal and the political, that I want to study this in my work, that I believe we are all complicit in the history which unfolds around us and that we bear (at some level) responsibility for it. Further, my personal story is also my introduction to relating to this war and, because of this, the seed of my motivation for Noor.

My own starting point for the war, hand-me-down clothes for Hamida's children, red POW banners, ghost-like houses in Islamabad, does not stand alone. It is tiny, but it co-mingles with the starting points of others in relation to the war, the policy makers, the prime ministers, generals, civil servants, army commanders, soldiers, POWs, the families who were left behind, the families who fled. All of us participate in the same scenario, a scenario I see as one of silence and forgetting. Here I'm speaking of Pakistan, but Pakistan does not stand alone. There are plenty of other countries who wrestle (or not) with their pasts, who have tragedies in the drawers of their own histories that they can't seem to recognize or break free from. It's possible that we live in exactly such a country right now, where photographs of Private Lynndie England make the current tragedy explicit for some of us, but because silence is crucial to our society, the photographs have not changed policy and it is questionable whether they have even spurred honest debates. The shape of the silence changes with countries, but the fact of it is the same. I felt claimed by silence and its partner, forgetting. There is something to the notion that we don't claim our subject matter, it claims us. And this is how I felt while I researched and wrote Noor.

I wanted to write a novel about war, but concentrate on a particular dimension. I wanted to write about the after-the-fact-war, the war that keeps on happening in the minds of returning soldiers, just as (I thought) it must in the minds of their family members, the wives who couldn't share what their husbands had seen and done, the children who'd never have their answers answered quite enough. It seemed to me that in war there is enough complicity and sorrow to go around to include everyone. Rather than concentrate on the large battlefield facts of real war, I wanted to study it in the theatre, shall we say, of a family. As I began to think about my characters in Noor and the events in which their significance would be discovered began to emerge, I had endless questions. Where were all these soldiers? Why don't they talk about what they did? What they saw? What they were thinking? Did they rape women because they were told to? Did they shoot at random because they were afraid or because they wanted to kill? How did they learn what they knew about Bengalis? What did it feel like, to be an occupying force? Did they believe in what they were fighting for? While playing with these questions, I kept returning to something else. How was it that those responsible for horrors could slide back into society as easily as if they'd been away on a hiatus, a vacation of some kind? Who were those who let them in? Who were their wives and mothers, fathers, and children?

I knew that I had to engage in research to write my novel. I didn't think I could write my novel without trying to read everything I could about the 1971 war, without visiting the places it occurred in, without speaking to people who'd been there. As it happened, I was lucky enough to be funded by a grant that allowed me to do exactly these things. I thought I had a plan, the one I laid out in my grant proposal which funded my travels to Pakistan and Bangladesh. I wrote that I was interested in the reconciliation between soldier and society, and the reconciliation between victim and the past. I would conduct interviews, study archived documents, visit museums, travel to the settings mentioned in interviews, visit scenes of mass graves, speak to survivors. Before leaving for Pakistan, I spent hours coming up with questions I wanted to pose to prospective interviewees, believing that the right questions would unlock the mystery of this war. Why did you join the army? What were your expectations of East Pakistan before you got there? Did you ever think of deserting? Did you feel betrayed when you returned home? What was it like to see death so young? Do you talk about the war?

When I first arrived in Pakistan in 1999, a few months before the coup in which General Musharraf overthrew Nawaz Sharif, I hadn't, of course, any clue of how I would meet up with soldiers willing to tell me their life stories. Initially, it was very difficult to find people who would talk to me about their experiences in 1971. I made my way through several bureaucrats who'd rather have said nothing at all. In fact, nothing was more difficult than getting the people who were responsible for policy to speak to me at all. But rather than engage in an evaluation of history, they seemed desperate to repeat what was once said, put into practice, and failed, as if the old arguments could stand up to the facts. After speaking to them, I was left with the impression that time does many things, but it doesn't necessarily set the record straight.

Finding people willing to talk to me who had a war narrative different from the policy makers was difficult. With the help of a friend, I met the owner of a Guest House in Rawalpindi, a person who'd fought in East Pakistan, and through him I met his friends whom he encouraged to speak with me. The confluence of all this led me to many evenings as the only woman surrounded by many soldiers in a cramped, poorly lit office-like room in a not-so-slowly dilapidating hotel where the food was fabulous, the talk was long, and stories finally emerged.

When I was originally writing my grant proposal that took me to Pakistan and Bangladesh, I thought finding answers was merely a question of posing questions. I thought all it would take was to talk to a few honest people who had answers at the tip of their tongues, and then be done with it. I had no idea how complicated it was: that in speaking to people who'd been monsters they became people again, funny and loving, smart and witty, kind and polite. Several of the men were, amazingly, the funniest people I've ever met. Every one of them was jolly, downright funny. We laughed while we drank tea together in marathon interviews that circled around details of horrible encounters they remembered and retold a wealth of funny details: dentures falling out, untied pants falling down, the expressions on the faces of soldiers caught engaged in friendly fire. Their humor was a fact that I wasn't prepared for and if it hadn't been so pervasive, so defining, I wouldn't have believed it. It was astonishing to discover that returning soldiers traumatized both by what they'd done and what they'd seen were people in many ways no different from me or you. In hearing their stories, I discovered that the soldiers of 1971 were everywhere and that their families were people who lived, almost literally, next door to us. They are people with pasts and histories and memories that collude to work in ways that let them survive. But they are, of course, also the reason for our silence. To acknowledge their hardship, to acknowledge their stories is to shatter the silence we imagine protects us from who we are or who we might, under the right circumstances, have become.

Someone I interviewed told me that before he left West Pakistan for his assignment in East Pakistan, his uncle saw him off at the train station. His uncle held on to him longer than he was accustomed and before whispering prayers, his uncle quoted a verse from Waris Shah, the Sufi poet. The translation that was offered was this: "The people who say-those who go away will return-tell lies." As the uncle had the foresight to warn his nephew, the person who returns from war is different than the person who left for it. We don't, in our societies, have a mechanism for understanding or accepting this, and when I spoke to the soldiers about their homecomings they routinely offered how changed they'd been by war, how different they felt, how odd it was to find family members living their lives in the same houses, the same rooms, the same way they had before their departure. They were somewhat astonished at the odd contradiction that the life that's left behind does go on.

As it turns out, in these mostly group interviews, I had the opportunity to question some soldiers. For the most part, I didn't pose the questions that I'd spent months coming up with because when I was making my list, I hadn't learned yet that interviews can't be scripted, that the most fruitful interviews are the ones in which the interviewee is allowed to tell his or her story with as much freedom as possible, without being interrupted, prompted, or directed with questions.

During those long nights I learned that the process of interviewing someone strangely shares something with the process of writing. Just like letting the interviewee tell his story, you have to let the story (in my case, a novel) tell itself. It's no use directing it, telling it what it might do, interrupting to pose questions it isn't ready to tackle, because it'll stop revealing itself to you. It's during the slowest times, when your patience is most tried, but you hang in there, that the story begins to work. And so it was during my interviews with subjects who wanted to talk about what they wanted to talk about at their own pace and wanted me only to shut up and listen. But when the Captain answered my Why? with the I've waited my whole life for someone to ask that question, his words were like a zoom lens finding focus in my project.

When I'd initially thought about my novel and when I'd written my grant proposal, I'd decided to concentrate on two aspects: in Pakistan I would study the reconciliation between soldier and society, and in Bangladesh I would study the reconciliation between victim and his/her past. In both aspects, the overarching question was the same. How is it that people can move on after witnessing or participating in the horror of war? But after the Captain offered his answer so quickly and so clearly, I wondered if my focus wasn't bifurcated, obtuse. Not really understanding the gravity of the situation I was trying to understand, his response, his waiting, brought it into focus. Perhaps, I considered, if he and, possibly, others had been waiting their whole lives for someone to listen to their experiences, to validate them by listening and nothing more, there was a quantity, an immensity, to the experience of a returning soldier that required full attention. Quite possibly this alone was far more than I could do. I'd begun writing my novel before I began my interviews, but found that the research I was doing brought me at once closer to my characters and further away, and the gritty work of writing my novel came to a standstill. The novel which became Noor had already taken hold of me, but with this interview and the ones that followed, it held me in new ways and wouldn't let me go
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My research wouldn't have been honest if I hadn't traveled to Bangladesh. There, I had another moment like the one I had with the Captain, but perhaps even more defining for my research. My plan was to interview victims of atrocities. While many of them had died as part of the overall numbers of dead during the war, there were those who'd survived. I'd read some of their first-person accounts that various organizations in Bangladesh were collecting as part of their own research. The atrocities were disturbing because of what they encompassed-rape, torture, murder, and their varieties. They were further disturbing because of how these atrocities differed little from those committed in other wars during other episodes in history. It occurs to me that there is a resonance in recent newspaper photographs depicting what is happening right now. Atrocities seem to be an instrument of war. I was told this in my interviews over and over again with soldiers at the Guest House in Rawalpindi. Their logic wasn't flawed: if they were taught that Bengalis were far beneath them, colored, shameless, effeminate, not real Muslims, why should it ever have been expected that the soldiers would have treated them otherwise? That's what you do in war, that is war. As one of them said, if you believe your enemy is lowly, like an animal (and it was pointed out that you do believe this when you go to war), why would you treat him any differently than, say, a stray dog bothering you in the street?

When I arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I was met at the airport by Noreen. As we began the ride into the city, it was immediately clear that Dhaka was unlike any other city that I'd ever visited. History is everywhere on display. Parts of the city are divided by traffic roundabouts and in each roundabout, it seemed, was a remnant of the war I planned to study. In one was a captured tank, in another a shot down Air Force plane, and in others, barely identifiable but recovered war machinery. The landscape of the city was defined by the 1971 war.

Noreen asked me where in Bangladesh I planned to travel. The first place I mentioned was Chittagong, a city south of Dhaka, very much on the water. When she asked me why I told her that when I was a child I had heard of the 1970 cyclone that claimed one million lives. I'd heard about this as a child in Vienna, listening to the voices of BBC and VOA news announcers. She started to tell me a story of how she was a child of six or seven then, living in her grandmother's house, and when the rains started, water flooded the house and they had to take shelter on the roof. She recounted how afraid she was, of the rising water, the noise, the darkness, and she felt, as a child, as if she might die. Then she asked me how I would spend my few months in Bangladesh. I told her what I'd written in my grant proposal: I'd visit archives, visit museums, travel to where mass graves had been found, speak to survivors. Before I'd finished, Noreen interrupted me impatiently and said that she could tell me what I needed to know about the war. "Remember the cyclone?" she asked and then began to tell me what I needed to know.

She told me that her childhood fear of the cyclone the night she was sure she would die was nothing compared to the fear she felt a few months later, back in Dhaka, during the war. She lost family members, and her co-worker whom I was about to meet, had lost his father and others. She told me that if I could take the fear she felt sitting on the rooftop with water rising from below and falling from above and magnify it one hundred fold, I might (and she was doubtful) have some sense of what the 1971 war felt like. By the time she'd finished, we'd come to Dhaka University where a triangular roundabout was filled with stone busts of renown academics who'd lost their lives on March 21, 1971, the night the war began. Noreen ran off the names of people who'd been killed, their positions at the university, their departmental affiliations. By the time we reached the Guest House in which I'd be staying, I knew that I would not be able to conduct the kind of interviews I'd naively imagined possible. I could not possibly, in good conscience, approach a woman who'd been raped or a son who'd lost his father, with the ridiculous television news question of "so what did that feel like?" even if that would have informed my characters in Noor more fully.

Sitting in my room in the guest house, my notes strewn about me, trying to figure out how to start my work, I finally accepted the decision that seemed to have been made for me on my ride from the Dhaka airport. Reading through my notes for Noor and drafts of a few chapters, I tried to get back to work. But my conversation with Noreen changed the course of my work, both in terms of the scope of my research and the scope of my novel. I wouldn't interview victims and ask them the demeaning question of "How did you manage to go on?" (as if they had a choice) when, in fact, the answer, "Because we had to," was stupidly obvious. Noreen, perhaps, nudged me towards this thinking a bit more quickly than I might have arrived at it on my own, but my travels to Bangladesh, regardless of Noreen, would have changed my work. It also became clear to me, not just that day but in the weeks ahead when I met other people, that the job of chronicling victimization, of making the case for restitution, of demanding apologies, was someone else's work. Someone who spoke the language and was connected to the land in an immediate rather than superficial way. Bangladeshis must tell their own stories, in their own ways, with whatever mediums they make available to themselves. And they have been doing this, even if the rest of us have not been listening.

In Bangladesh where the deaths of between 300,000 people and 3 million people means that almost everyone can summon a relative or friend claimed by the war, it would seem that the conflict is, in some ways, far from being buried in silence and forgetting. But there is another aspect to this war that changes its reality, if only slightly. During the 1971 conflict, the large numbers of deaths claimed in the academic and intellectual communities, might not have been possible without the efforts of the collaborators who provided the army with prized information. This collaborator's role is Bangladesh's testament to how silence and forgetting shapes societies after war. Just like confronting the soldier with the question "why?", confronting the collaborator with the same question puts society on the line. It asks of us to explain loyalties and betrayal, in short to justify who we are and why. It is a difficult question to ask of anyone, but in the context of war it is almost impossible. And yet, if it is not asked, how can we avoid our same mistakes? How can we learn and grow and hope to become more civil?

It is possible, as General Musharraf says, that wounds may heal with time, but they probably won't unless we rise above the silence and forgetting and the wounds are put on the table to be examined, dressed, nurtured back to health. We don't do this by not taking responsibility for our actions, not opening ourselves up to debates about what we might have or should have done, and not learning, together, about our mistakes. There is a way of thinking in some circles about the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947, a different partition twenty-four years before 1971, one which saw the deaths of one million and the migration of ten million across borders. The saying goes that because violence is rooted in our very being and because we've never come to terms with it, it festers inside us, only waiting, inevitably, to be let out. Like in 1971, perhaps, and who knows when again in the future. But this way of considering ourselves relieves us of responsibility, allows us to think of the personal and political in separate spaces that do not overlap while all around us the personal is swallowed by the political. That's what I learned in Noor where Ali, the returning soldier, thinks he can pack away his war experiences in tightly closed drawers only to discover that his gifted granddaughter pries them open with little effort for all to see.

The way we write ourselves and our memories makes our histories. We have a responsibility not to be silent, not to forget, to ask questions, to demand that our histories and our memories reconcile, can reconcile, in peace. While writing my novel, I came across a lovely line by the poet Agha Shahid Ali. Although the poem was written about Kashmir, where Agha Shahid Ali was from, it could be, in its beauty and truth regarding silence and forgetting, written about any number of places and times. In his poem, Farewell, he says, Your history gets in the way of my memory. In Noor, my hope was that history and memory would meet, and in this dance a moment of silence and forgetting might be explored.