Monday, November 6, 2023

Genocide in Gaza and the Taxidermied Man

 These days I am translating selected poetry of a Punjabi Dalit poet, Madan Veera, and shortly going to publish the collection. Here is one of the poems from the collection:  


 Taxidermied Man


Atma Rama

now you are neither the veheda’s Atma

nor the veheda’s soul

because in the haze of bharm

in the fog of dharm

your identity is shrinking

your existence has been circumscribed

 

You are scattering into bits

floating like specks of dust

rhapsodizing about dharm

in the rush of hollow slogans

in the hope of securing your afterlife

in the effort to break out of the cycle of eighty-four

seeking the path to mukti

you have become a dweller of the chimerical world

of dharm gurus and dharmsthans

 

Searching for moksha

you have found like many others like you

your own Sarvashaktimaan

that matches your deluded mind

Now the reins of your life

are in the hands of

your self-created Tyrant

your folded hands are bound

in your self-made handcuffs

your closed eyes enclose

self-created stale dreams

your closed lips are iterating

 a cycle of sleepy words

Now to listen with your ears

to see with your eyes

to speak with your tongue

is sinful for you 

 

Now you are no longer a

shining

burning

thinking human being

 you are a milch cow’s

taxidermied dummy

of the calf that died last month

stinking stuffed with straw

that we use

at the time of milking

---  


I wish to draw the reader's attention to the title of this poem, Taxidermied Man While searching the Internet to check if I had used the right expression, I was horrified to discover that there indeed existed a real example of a Taxidermied Man. Please read the following to experience the horror perpetrated by a white man on a black man:

        

                            Taxidermied Man            

          Man stuffed and displayed like a wild animal




 In the early 19th Century, it was fashionable for Europeans to collect wild animals from around the globe, bring them home and put them on display. One French dealer went further, bringing back the body of an African warrior. It was on display as a museum exhibit in France and Spain. Generations of Europeans gaped at his half-naked body, which had been stuffed and mounted by a taxidermist. There he stood, nameless, exhibited like a trophy titled El Negro. 

This is what one visitor says on watching the display.

'This was not Madame Tussaud's. I was not staring at an illusion of authenticity - this black man was neither a cast nor some kind of mummy. He was a human being, displayed like yet another wildlife specimen. History dictated that the taxidermist was a white European and his object a black African. The reverse was unimaginable. I flushed and felt the roots of my hair prickling - simply from a diffuse sense of shame.'


Please go to the following link to read the full story on BBC website that makes one’s hair stand on end.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37344210


This touches the lowest depth of Whiteman’s racism. Thinking of what is happening in Gaza these days one wonders whether the European man has undergone any substantial change of heart.

 Let us understand that ethnic cleansing is not new to the Western man. It has a long and continuing tradition: Cleansing of North and South Ameria, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Africa of their indigenous inhabitants. 

And why forget Europe itself. The Europeans were bent upon cleansing Europe of the Jews, having had a centuries long history of persecution of the Jews culminating in what happened around the WWII. The Europeans, after the German massacre of 6 million Jews in the holocaust, succeeded in getting rid of the vast majority of their Jewish population pushing them off to Palestine, their so-called Promised Land, and helping them to cleanse Palestine of Arabs who have lived there for centuries. Isn't it ironic that the Zionist Jews who suffered the most at the hands of the European Christians, instead of wreaking vengeance on their persecutors, are using them to persecute the Palestinians who hardly had any serious history of quarrel with the Jews.  Gaza is the latest playground of this White man's game of ethnic cleansing.

---