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“Muzzammil bhai, why don’t you share some posts on Sharjeel bhai and his suffering in prison” is one of the many messages I receive on a daily basis on various social media platforms. This is the response from Ammi, Sharjeel and myself.
Against Romanticism
We realise the intention behind these requests is to keep reminding the public of what took place almost 7 years ago. However, I wonder what is it that the public does not already know about the case. All of Sharjeel’s speeches, writings, interviews are in the public domain. The case timeline and court verdicts are all public. At times one wonders if anything of our family has remained private. One wonders, how much more exhibition must the families of the incarcerated put forth to keep the spark of public memory alive.
Must grief be performed in public for the sake of public memory? Is there a difference between public grief and private grief?
There is a certain image of pitiable courage that the people expect to see from political prisoners and their families. As families of unjustly incarcerated, we are fully aware of the responsibility of constantly presenting an image of defiance and hope. And there is indeed no pretense in that. Even on a mere 10-day bail for my wedding, Sharjeel was in public smiling, defiant and unfazed. Anyone who looked at him. one wouldn’t be able to guess this man has not seen the world for the past seven years.
This is the public grief, the “suffering” we are expected to share. These moments are few and far between – court verdicts, bail hearings and rejections, the occasional news report. However, private grief is less romantic. Rather, it shunts romanticism.
Between these public moments, are thousands of days and tens of thousands to hours that refuse to pass. This is the story we can neither turn into poetry, not slogans, not even a spectacle for public memory or hope. Precisely because the hardest moments are those when nothing happens, nothing worth writing, narrating, performing. The most difficult times during these seven years have not been spent in courtrooms or before the police or the media; they have been spent on empty dinner tables, silent nights, staring at my ammi’s face while she looks away into the distance, pouring over photo albums of our childhood, and forcing a smile when our eyes meet.
One common theme between public and private grief is that there is performance in both during video calls with Sharjeel, we smile at each other and convince unconvincingly that “all is good, do not worry”. “Alhumdulillah, all is good at home”. “Alhumdulillah, all is good at Tihar too”, he says.
So, this is our response on why we might have failed to sustain the public memory of my brother. Much of the last seven years have passed in silence, counting days, sometimes hours and yet losing track of time. So, when I am asked to describe how we are doing, I invite you to imagine an empty home and imagine it day after day after day for 2400 days and counting. The process is the punishment. The waiting is the persecution.
Against Spectacle
Apart from the absolute banality and mundaneness of this trial, I will not deny there is an intentional decision to not create a spectacle out of our private grief. The trial (both judicial and media) are available for the public to peruse, we are open to statements and interviews and answers. However, we have chosen to align our public presence with our politics. A politics built and defined by defiance, self-assertion, dignity must be appropriately represented by the same. We condemn vulture-ish tendencies of certain media-houses to rake views based on weeping, breaking down images of the families of undertrials. The media expects a spectacle to behold, some dramatisation of suffering, reenactment of grief which can be recorded and rewatched over coffees and snacks and then scrolled away. We stand against the spectacle, we stand against the reformulation of public memory of Sharjeel Imam from a leader to a victim.
The public memory must thrive on the recollections of resistance, not suffering.
Finally, there is a simple truism with profound implications for the politics of the undertrials: The living are not dead. One must resist the tendency to speak of the living, resisting, fighting as though they have been martyred. The struggle has not ended. It cannot be seen as past or converted into poetry. It is current and it is now.
To turn a living political prisoner into a martyr is to make him easier to remember but harder to hear. Martyrdom freezes a person into an image: noble, tragic and safely removed from the present. It replaces his politics with his suffering and his arguments with our tributes.
The prisoner becomes someone to mourn rather than someone with whom we must continue to think, disagree, organise and struggle.
Sharjeel does not need to be memorialised. He needs to be read, heard and engaged with as a living political being. His incarceration has restricted his movement, but it has not suspended his agency, erased his ideas or concluded his political life. Sympathy displaces politics.
It is also to be noted that the apprehensions of evaporating from public memory might themselves be misplaced. None other than the state machinery keeps demonstrating that the memory of Sharjeel and Umar are alive and thriving. The recent detention and arrests of students all over the nation for merely holding up placards in support of Sharjeel and Umar are testament that the state machinery does not merely remember them but is actively trying to suppress public recognition.
We will not narrate seven years of imprisonment as a complete story simply because stories demand endings. There is no ending yet. There is an ongoing trial, an ongoing injustice and a living person waiting to return home and his politics.
jab huā irfāñ to ġham ārām-e-jāñ bantā gayā
soz-e-jānāñ dil meñ soz-e-dīgarāñ bantā gayā
(When self-realization dawned upon me, my sorrows turned into comfort for my soul, and the personal ache of love transformed into a universal empathy for humanity.)
(The writer is a political activist and the younger brother of Sharjeel Imam. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)