Personal Diary: Communities of Fear – Lahore, 6th December 2012

Fear.

I have consistently came across fear in almost all the people I have met, spoken to, interviewed and photographed so far. Perhaps I have paid particular attention to the many manifestations of fear that pervade the lives of the people I am meeting because of the fear that has been my companion since I arrived here in Lahore to begin work on this project.

I spent my first weeks after arriving in Lahore pinned under fear. It practically crippled me. And even now, as I finally start to put this work together, I have not quite overcome it. But I do know that it has kept me awake at night, refused me solace during the day, forced me to revise my method at least three times, left me helplessly sitting in cafes staring into space, and forced me to weep quietly into my pillow. What has it been about? I have feared that I have no answers to the questions I am raising in the project, that I lack the words and knowledge to speak about the things I wanted to, that I have lost my eye and don’t know how to photograph the people I intend to meet and how to produce a work that is coherent, passionate, personal and relevant.

But I have also used my fear as a sanctuary – from the mocking smiles of those who do not understand what I am doing, from the dismissive gazes of those convinced of the pointlessness of it all. I have hidden behind fear so that I do not have to face the challenges being posed by people’s questions. Now however, I am making slow, tentative, doubt riddled steps out of this sanctuary – though there are relapses I will admit, and putting this work together, trusting my instincts and leaving it at that. The fear however, remains my constant companion.

I have carried this fear into the homes of the people I meet – the families mourning their dead in the aftermath of the Ali Enterprises factory fire, the men and women piecing together their lives after years spent in prisons on death row – the strains of that life marked on their skins, and in that defeated look in their eyes, and the proud and defiant men of Waziristan who had lost family members in drone attacks. And it is at these moments, faced with the fear that pervades the lives of these people, mine subsides like a fog in the light of the rising sun. It is also here that I realize the many ways in which fear contorts lives, and destroys resistance.

This has been particularly evident during my trip to Dera Islail Khan to collect the testimonies of those injured in recent drone attacks. I knew that I would have a hard time finding people to speak to me, but I had to try. And despite finding and meeting at least three people who were seriously injured in drone attacks, and despite giving them assurances of my integrity and commitment to speak out on their behalf, they refused to let me interview them, and photograph them. All of them expressed their refusal on the grounds that they had suffered a deep trauma as a result of the drone attacks, spent many months in rehabilitation, and even longer putting their lives back together, and that they were just not ready to risk it all on any account. That they had survived, that God had willed their new life, and they fears upsetting the balance and losing all that they had today. They were afraid that by should they come into the notice of ‘the authorities’, all would be lost.

Fear also marked the lives of the men and women I met while traveling in the Okara, Renala and Sahiwal farm lands. Here people lived in fear of men from the city – a car suggested authority, and a man in pants and shirt could only mean an arm of the state bureaucracy that came to take something – people, money, land or dignity. As I travelled in the region meeting men and women who had been on death row, rumors spread that I was there to document ex-prisoners and arrange their executions through police encounters! It took some phone calls to my contacts back in Lahore to calm people down and agree to meet me. Even then many never returned my calls, or mysteriously disappeared from their homes when we knocked on their doors. Oh, he just left for Multan (a city about 3 hours away) were frequent answers from family members.

In Karachi, the grieving, broken families of those died in the factory fire, were living in fear of the tomorrow. Many families were without any source of income as a result of the deaths, and because the survivors were unable to find new work. The fragility of their lives – a fragility that I can’t help but see as one created by human decisions, meant a fear of hunger, of homelessness, of exploitation and of the need to fall on their knees and beg. Time and again I heard their voices falter as they tried to figure out how to pay for their homes, their meals and the lives of their children. The compensation funds had softened the blow somewhat, but it was nothing more than a band-aid.

In the days after the accident there were many pompous statements by politicians, bureaucrats and officials of provincial and federal labor departments. But there was never any honest acknowledgement of the intentional erosion of labor welfare programs and protections since the nation joined the frenzy called globalization. In communities like Baldia Town globalization appeared as violence, its economic and working imperatives being translated into the most exploitative and eviscerating work practices and policies the country and its industrialists could devise. It bought with it fear – a fear of losing everything at a moment’s notice for simply raising a question, or challenging a practice, or demanding a fair wage, or requesting a sensible work practice, or insisting on a fair deal or even just being a few minutes more over a quiet meal.

I remember something that Edward Said’s wrote in his foreword to David Barsamian’s book Confronting Empire – interviews with the Pakistani writer / intellectual Eqbal Ahmed. He described how Eqbal Ahmed had called the Israelis and Palestinians as ‘two communities of suffering’, and how they must deal with each other’s realities. I have always loved that phrase – communities of suffering. There is something universal about it, something unifying that can help people see and share something even if they are otherwise apart and distant.

As I travel across Pakistan, as I see the failure of its Islamic ideology to unite a people I can’t help but see a different unity – one born not from any manufactured ideas of shared culture, history or national boundaries, but of fear. A nation made up of communities of fear, unified in their suspicion of power, their determination to keep their autonomy and dignity by actively undermining its institutions, and their determination to avoid its attentions as best possible.