Bangladesh: 24 Years a Slave
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
Westfield, IN
When Will Smith announced the winner of the Oscar award for the best picture of the year on March 2 nd 2014, it was not at all a big surprise. No doubt,12 Years a Slave had been a favorite, but the question was if the real life events of Solomon Northup as shown in the movie had moved enough Americans to ponder further on the racial discrepancy between Whites and Blacks; and if through his story the movie had brought the issue of discrimination back in the national discourse.
The competition was indeed tough. There was Alonso Curaon’s Gravity, a movie depicting the life of astronauts in space with its unique gravity-less 3D experience and then there was Martin Scorsesse’s Wolf of the Wall Street, a true story based on the life of Wall Street broker Jordan Belfort. Compared to both of them, 12 Years a Slave was an underdog that was much less glamorous and even less discussed during the Academy Award season.
The movie tells us about Solomon Northup, a violinist, a farmer and a free black man in the nineteenth century New York who leads a peaceful middle class life with his family. One day, he is approached by two White men in his home town regarding an opportunity to play violin professionally and get paid a handsome amount in Washington DC for a few days. Without thinking and heedlessly ignoring the details, he decides to travel with them to the Capital to return in just a few days. Out of excitement, he does not inform his family about his journey either, a mistake that he will regret for a long time. After their arrival in the big city, his partners take him to a restaurant for a dinner where he drinks few glasses of alcohol, ignoring the fact that he is the only black customer in the hall. Moments later, under the influence of drugs, he loses his consciousness never to wake up as a freeman for years to come.
He opens his eyes hours later, in a dark empty room of a sailing ship, his hands cuffed, his ankles chained, his body stripped of almost all his clothes. He realizes, at once, that he has been abducted and the people who approached him in New York have deceived him, a game that they planned and played very well while he, out of ignorance had kept on digging his own grave deeper and deeper.
The ship heads south toward New Orleans where he is going to be sold in the market as a slave. In the beginning, he tries to convince his White masters that he is a free black man, but to no avail. For the next 12 years, deep in the plantations, Solomon Northrop is treated like an animal, his body tortured, his back scarred by the lashes, his neck bruised by hanging, his hands roughened by the field work, his eyes filled with pain and tears, his ego tormented, and his soul humiliated.
12 Years a Slave has been produced by Brad Pitt among many other White men and depicts the brutal and inhumane treatment of Caucasians with their blacks slaves in the states where slavery was legal. For two hours or more in the movie, one gruesome event is followed by another cruel incidence. The viewer has no choice except to sympathize with Mr Northup and other blacks who are tortured, raped and abused.
With tears in your eyes after watching the show, you may ask why should Americans show these atrocities and publicize their own wrongdoings to the world. Or, would they have been better off had the white population tried to hide its mistakes and push them under the rug? Should Brad Pitt be tried under the treason law for bringing up such a sensitive topic of race in the limelight or encouraged and awarded with trophies, Academy Awards and medals for being truthful?
If he were living in Pakistan, the answer would have been simple: There was no way he would have been allowed to make a movie on a controversial issues where our role as a nation could be implicated as being irresponsible. We would have hurled abuses at him, if such a project was initiated. We would call all producers traitors, people who always bring up negativity and refuse to see the positive side. One of the politicians would have boycotted them saying that only an enemy agent could defame one’s own country like that; or implicated that the producers of the movie must be working on an agenda and have pushed the federal government to set up a commission to investigate; or have taken the case to the supreme court in a petition to charge them with treason. No matter how tolerant we might claim to be, such a movie would have been trashed by a segment of the society, people who identify themselves as hyper-nationalists and are committed to blame others for their own mistakes.
On the other hand, for many, the movie sends a strong message to all its viewers, a message to admit one's own faults, a commitment to learn from those mistakes, a resolve to undo the past, if possible, and to make a better future. Learning from Brad Pitt and his colleagues, we can tell the true and honest story of Bangladesh who may think of themselves as having been enslaved for 24 years by the West Pakistanis. We can admit that we have made mistakes. We cannot afford to deny them or attempt to trivialize our wrongdoings any longer; can we? We have to tell them that we understand how hurt they feel, that their pain is felt on our side as well, and that we want to move forward by holding each other’s hands as friends, without holding grudges against each other.
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