Mian Ijaz Ul HassanThe US citizens and others world over have refused to hand over their conscience and ‘self’ to President Bush because he is writing his laws with ‘common vengeance’. He is what he always was, but ‘naked now’. ‘We can’t blink it more’
‘The law of the jungle operates in the world’; someone observed in despair. ‘That is sometime true,’ I agreed, but adding that humans posses a consciousness and no longer live in a jungle. Humans have a memory and can conceptualise a future. They have established civilisations. Their accomplishments are beyond animal endeavour. Fortunately man may have evolved from the ape, but can never physically revert back. Ironically, man can now only regress to something worse. Once in a while there are individuals who have an irresistible urge to ape their ancestors and go beyond to their hoofed master. They must be restrained. This is what all of us must do to protect the ideas and visions of the world, which humans have nurtured and cherished in all these thousands of years.
Intizar Hussain in his short story expresses these concerns in a dramatic perspective. Akhri Admi (The Last Man) symbolically presents man’s inner turmoil by describing the predicament of humans living on an island. Overcome with evil temptations they gradually begin to transform into monkeys. At least no one is left but one Akhri Admi. Man is after all a man and has his moments of strength and weakness. Whenever the Akhri Admi surrenders to a temptation he finds his limbs begin to instantly transform into those of a monkey. Man takes courage and fights back the temptation and as a consequence reverts to his normal self again. This happens to him over and over again, but he does not give in and finally vows that whatever happens he will never allow himself to become a monkey. This is where we leave him and the story ends. A rather stern and telling method to inform the reader that he needs to be strong and vigilant. To remain human man cannot barter or surrender ‘self’.
I visited the United States for the first time in 1987, or perhaps a year or two later. On landing in New York at the La Guardia air terminal I instantly fell in love with America. There were people of all colours, different racial ethnic and religious backgrounds, intermingling without prejudice. It took only a moment’s hesitation for me to realise and accept that I was not being treated an alien. I have ever since visited the US on other occasions for different duration. During my visits I was able to paint the American landscape from Vermont and Maine in the north, through New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, Tennessee, Kentucky to Florida in the south. I painted the wild summer prospects, autumn in its arboreal radiance and virgin passages of snow, summarising aspects of nature asleep in the dead of winter, to its barest brevity. I have probably painted greater diversity of the American landscape than most American painters have had opportunity to address. Should that not alone make me an American? I love nature, but I like people more and never lose an opportunity to interact with them. I am eager to share my thoughts and know what are the concerns of others. In the States I have met great many sorts of peoples. I found most of them very kind and helpful. They would go out of the way to help.
The last time I was in The States I was placed between Miami and Fort Lauderdale in Florida. I was not up yet that morning when we were woken by a telephone call informing that one of the towers of the World Trade Centre was burning. My wife and I dashed downstairs and after impatiently fumbling with the remote control, we managed to put on the television. One of the towers were bellowing clouds of black smoke. Within minutes an aeroplane entered the TV screen from the left and in a blink disappeared in the second Tower. Now there were two great glass edifices bellowing smoke. Everyone was stunned. Even the American reporters, who can endlessly churn out words faster than water can pour out of a full tap, were silenced. What had happened was totally unexpected and unprecedented. No one knew what to expect next. Awareness slowly returned and the reporters returned to their business, conjecturing the extent of damage, which could have been caused to the towers and trying to alley fears assuring the viewers that the fire fighters were fighting to put out the fire. It was just when the language was reaching a crescendo of speculative inanity, first one and then the second Tower collapsed on its own foundations. Hell was let loose. One event led to the other and in a matter of days USA did not remain the same, as one knew it.
This reminds me of Arthur Miller who referring to the era of McCarthyism, writes, ‘It was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory even of certain elemental decencies which a year or two earlier no one would have imagined could be altered let alone forgotten. Astounded, I watched men pass me by without a nod whom I had known rather well for years...Terror in these people was being knowingly planned and consciously engineered, and yet all they knew was terror. That so interior and subjective an emotion could have been so manifestly created from within was a marvel to me.’ (Introduction to Collected Plays)
Today it is even more evident how the people of the United States have been frightened out of their wits. People who have gallantly fought to win freedom and their civil and human rights have been easily persuaded to surrender their essential rights to the State and Government. At the time Arthur Miller was writing The Crucible, he was appalled at what was happening to the ‘Land of the Free.’ Salem witch-hunt for many years remained, E R Wood informs in the Preface to the Play, an inexplicable darkness to Miller, until he saw in a modern parallel the essence of its source and its evil powers. This was the time when Senator McCarthy was ruthlessly determined to hunt individuals as communists and as the Salem judges had been to hunt out witches. Even mildly liberal views were considered sufficient evidence of a person being a communist. It is quite frightening how a well-planned campaign of an extreme conservative political force can create not only terror, but also a new subjective reality, which can transform itself into a Crusade or a Holy War. President Bush’s threat, ‘Either you are with us or against us’, reminds one of what Danforth, the Deputy Governor, says to Francis Nurse: ‘But you must understand sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there is no road between.’ (Act 3, The Crucible). Seeing in his own time the evil of hunting political adversaries, Arthur Miller writes, ‘the sin of public terror is that it divests a man of conscience, of himself.’ Above all,’ he writes, ‘I accepted the notion that conscience was no longer a private matter, but one of state administration.’
Bush administration, which was first conducting a vicious witch-hunt in the name of terrorism, is now conducting a war against a sovereign state on the plea of eliminating weapons of mass destruction. At the same time it has been demanding of its own people and weak countries to ‘hand over their conscience’. Anyone who will not submit is being threatened and targeted. Fortunately there is a worldwide reaction against US government’s unilateral invasion of Iraq. The reaction cuts across political, ideological, and geographical as well as religious differences. The US citizens and others world over have refused to hand over their conscience and ‘self’ to President Bush because he is writing his laws with ‘common vengeance’. He is what he always was, but ‘naked now’. ‘We can’t blink it more’. (The Crucible)
Prof Ijaz-ul-Hassan is a painter, author and a political activist