The paranoia of silence and the fear of sleeping

by Barnali Saha

A YEAR since July the 36^th, I am convinced that July will always have exactly thirty-one days from now on—not a day more. Time will never bend or veer or expand for us again. It won’t stretch to help us build a new world, or usher in a ‘new spring’ as Faiz has longed for in the melancholy voice of Mehdi Hassan: ‘Gulon mein rang bhare, baad-e-naubahaar chale…’. ‘Let the flowers fill with colours, let the breeze of a new spring blow; come, beloved, and get the garden go about its business!’ Our proverbial garden is back to business-as-usual, though it was not the ‘Year of Democracy’ for us. The year neither waited nor cared for blossoms to unfurl, nor for the breeze to shift. 

Yet, how can we forget that thousands of flowers had bloomed bright red—like an explosion of a gigantic star made of human flesh—and withered without notice? What is the exact number of deaths? 1000? Maybe 1400.  How neat are numbers! Even neater now that July the 36th is never coming back. 

History counts its skeletons in round numbers.A thousand and one remains a thousand,as though the one had never existed.

— Hunger Camp at Jaslo, 1962, Wislawa Szymborska (translated from the original Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

I

MY PERSONAL loss was almost nothing compared to what many had gone through. A serious dip in mental and psychological wellbeing, an artistically unproductive year, a distant relative who lost one of his eyes to shotgun pellets during one of the street protests last July, a fresh addiction to the 24-hour news cycle on social media, a disrupted sleep cycle, a failed attempt at organised activism post-July, a list of comrades and close friends forever un-friended (good riddance), a list of family members alive but gone forever (not such good riddance). I just bumped into an undated entry from last year in my notebook:

‘A friend is always somewhat insufferable. But if how long you suffer your friend depends not on the depth of your friendship, but on the potential harm that friend could cause you — then know that you are living in a fascist society.’

Good riddance, then, dear friends! It looks like at least one of my miniscule personal losses is worth celebrating. Maybe it was never a loss to begin with. I kept my writer friends. They constantly indulge me with platitudes and parables as to why it is perfectly alright to lose one’s writerly discipline after a series of traumatic events happening back home, how even Hemingway sometimes missed his daily wordcount target, how it is okay for me to go on with my regular cheats (‘I’ll start writing the next chapter of my novel after I’ve checked my FB homepage once. Just this once!’). ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, my friends quote Theodor Adorno, the philosopher. I have a sneaking suspicion that they are telling all this to themselves, not just to me. We are all stuck, trapped, frustrated — bitter and very unhappy with our time, only this time it is not for a fashionable effect. 

Poet and essayist Anne Boyer, the poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, resigned from her post at the NYT in 2023. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer writes in her resignation letter that ‘the Israeli state’s US-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone’ and that she ‘won’t write about poetry amid the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatise us to this unreasonable suffering.’ I am sure she is also very unhappy with her time. 

Anne Boyer dealt with her unhappiness with the help of what we roughly know as moral courage. How do we deal with ours? ‘Aamra kotha boli, kenona nirobota fascist’er bhasha’ (‘We speak, because silence is the language of the fascist’), wrote Hasan Robayet, arguably the most quoted and memefied poet of the July uprising. How apt and how hard-hitting that line burnt on those walls: a flame of red, green, yellow hues, and how hollow it rings now, taken out of its context, stripped of its profundity and urgency! We speak because we do not care; we speak because we do not listen; we speak because we hate the ‘other’; we speak because our religion, our ideology, our ethnicity, our party line is the supreme one, we speak because our realpolitik is right here right now on this algorithmic metaverse of inflammatory words and content — spewing hatred, posing as strongmen, inciting violence, hostility and discrimination. We speak because we belong to a culture that is fascist to its core.    

The trauma of the last regime has made us afraid of our own silence. Our only refuge was our voices: our collective voices. Expressing ourselves helped us breakout from one of the most brutal episodes of our national history.  But there is more to the complex phenomenon called self-expression. Self-expression is not only our default mode, neither it is just our human right, it is also the status quo that is heavily rewarded by the black box called the internet. The black box is profiting off of our insatiable need to drown out every other sound in the universe, and our appetite for the prized membership in our own little echo-chambers. 

And when self-expression is the status quo, sometimes the most radical thing that one can do is stay silent.  

II

JON Kabir, celebrated Bangladeshi vocalist and singer-songwriter of Indalo is in my Facebook friend list. My newsfeed recently showed one of his posts that was a eulogy of sorts after the death of a fellow-musician. Jon was not the only one from my FB friend list on that day who grieved the untimely demise of Ratul, a young musician with immense talent: it was one of those days when you feel the collective weight of the loss of a person you never knew. The comment section in Jon Kabir’s post had the usual ‘RIP’s and the also-usual internet bullies. Jon was being berated by a random follower for publicly grieving the death of a young musician but never saying a word publicly about the gruesome deaths of the children of Uttara’s Milestone School. I felt my cortisol level rising — there are those days when one can go on ignoring unwarranted rage displayed by fellow humans, and there are days when one cannot. How else do your hormones react when you feel the second-hand pressure to perfect your performative ‘revolutionary’? With every national tragedy that could be avoided with better leadership and better governance by the grossly ineffective interim government and the current ruling class, do you rush to manufacture a response immediately? Do you turn every national crisis into an aesthetic statement? Turn your pain into a policy-position that your fellow citizens will hold you accountable for? And call that poetry? Because how dare you remain silent? What is your motive? What is your agenda? Are you yourself a fascist, an ally or an enabler? A right-wing apologist maybe? Let’s do a quick review of your deeds over the past sixteen years, and assign a convenient tag to you — how would you like that?

Collected

On that same day, I was listening to a long-form deshi podcast. The person being interviewed has been a central figure of the University Teachers’ Network, an activists’ platform that was at the forefront of the July uprising. In the interview, she candidly expressed her disappointment at the newfangled political class made up of the young’uns that had led the movement and voiced her criticism of the interim government. Despite playing such a pivotal role in the movement’s progressive faction, she herself has been a victim of ‘tagging’ — the tritest tendency of the fascist’s toolbox, only this time the perpetrators are from the post-July benefactor-beneficiary class. She was asked by the interviewer if she was noticing any immediate, positive externality of the mass uprising yet, to which, her answer was goodhearted and wholesome, adequately optimistic — albeit perplexing (to me).   

 She said, ‘The best outcome of the July uprising is this: people are always alert, always awake’.

Staying always awake is a wonderful Übermensch feat — at its best; at its worst, it is a function of our reptilian brain that the 24-hour news cycle of the internet has held captive and successfully enslaved. We stay desperately awake, while our minds and consciousness (both collectively and individually) are laying bare to be extracted and exploited. Hours spent awake with a device with internet connection directly translates into fat bottom-lines in Big Tech plutocrats’ income statement, where user content engagement drives revenue upward and a scaled-up tech interface drives cost downward. As a Bangladeshi business graduate from the early 2000s, my mind has been forever scarred by the phrase ‘thriving consumerism’: a platitude used by the corporate class frequenting the boardroom presentations of multinational companies trying to make a grand entrance or a fresh round of investment in the Bangladeshi market. In the era of artificial intelligent and big data, ‘always awake’/ ‘always on’ is the new substitute of ‘thriving consumerism’.  In modern boardrooms, such phrases rustle like crisp banknotes, as the market research data shows a ‘steep demographic dividend’: another corporate platitude, to mean an enormous percentage of the general population being young (and impressionable).

If we are staying forever-lucid and forever-awake in a common room designed and engineered by Big Tech plutocrats, what is so amazing about it? What exactly is to be celebrated there? Is this what Slavoj Zizek talks about when he says that social media is a site where ‘ideological fantasies’ are perpetuated? Our activist-desires, particularly those of freedom, connection and political alertness, are both produced and reinforced on the internet; but this fantasy-fulfilling phenomenon is often hiding underlying power structures and systemic inequalities. Our opinions are not being formed in a vacuum — in a pure, unmediated, tabula rasa format. The vehicle of the internet is not spreading our opinions ‘organically’, even though ‘organic reach’ is used as an often misleading term to mean unpaid-for content in digital marketing. Around the world, voters have been forced to make major decisions about their future while navigating a censored, distorted, and unreliable information space. Whistleblowers of Big Tech organisations and independent researchers have uncovered the predatory business model of companies like Meta, Snapchat and Tiktok (Google or Amazon to a lesser degree). Amnesty International has already worked out the amount of money owed by Meta (the company that owns Facebook) to Myanmar for playing a role in the violence against the Rohingya population. Amnesty’s report shows Meta’s responsibility in the Ethiopia conflict as well, and that the company can be sued in Kenya for ethnic violence. Amnesty has reported that Meta uses engagement-based algorithmic systems to curate our FB news feed, thereby shaping what is seen on the platform. Meta profits when Facebook users stay on the platform as long as possible, by selling more targeted advertising. The display of demagogic content and content that advocates hatred, violence and hostility is an effective way of keeping people on the platform longer. 

We are kept alert, kept awake, kept on a mission to search for truth, because a morbid fear of sleeping has been injected in our system. But a carefully curated sense of reality served up by the algorithm gods can hardly get us near truth. Even having the knowledge of how the black box works does not really shield us from the dark aspects of the algorithm-driven platforms, as the effects work on and work through our subconscious. Our information ecosystem is becoming less and less efficient in finding what is ‘truth’, while we are becoming more and more fragmented and atomised. With the level of freedom deserved by the mainstream media still being curbed under the interim government, with our weaker institutions and an unabated craving for foreign technology and investment, our vulnerabilities in the new-age information space are many.

With artificial intelligence, humanity is entering the most transformative episode since the invention of the steam engine. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence deployed through social media is introducing polarisation; the same means that had helped us overthrow the previous regime are now making us perpetually angry at each other, ready to annihilate any opposition. Since the July mass uprising, we have seen demagogues feed people’s fears and stir their tribalism. We have seen our fragile state of freedom turn into a state of tyranny by the majoritarianists. (Is this why Plato thought democracy was the second worst form of government?) As we see uncontrollable forces creating the conditions for our own brand of ‘neo-fascism’, how do we find new ways of bringing people together and creating communities in a politically meaningful way? 

Is this the end of our democracy? Our fear of sleeping, our fear of silence: is that the death knell of our hopes? 

What do we do if the only way to put an end to continuous cruelty is to wake up, and to scream? Theodor Adorno, the same man who condemned ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz’, contradicted himself later: ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.’

But where are our screams situated? Which walls do they bounce off and reverberate from? Who amplifies our screams? On the internet, we are generating our sound bites in a chamber where overcommunication is rewarded. As an expat Bangladeshi myself, I believe my friends and comrades currently living in Bangladesh when they say that the physical space is no different, that our sonic existence has become desperately overlapped: characterised by our speaking faculty—not our listening faculty. What overcommunication ends up creating is no communication, resulting in complicit silence. The perversion is in its design: overabundance diminishes meaning; and without meaning, there is no protest, no scream, no revolution.

Barnali Saha is a Bangladeshi author of literary fiction, living in Australia. She is also a Khayal musician of the North Indian tradition.