Solitude: A Necessary Condition of Solidarity

Before tele­vi­sion became lib­er­al­ly flat­tened, and overt­ly democ­ra­tized by the Army in pow­er (Mushar­raf’s regime), there were only two or three nation­al chan­nels we had. We did­n’t have much of free­dom of speech, so to speak. Nonethe­less, there was some­thing else: lack of eupho­ria. The tele­vised images of love, there­fore, were motion­less, sieved by the con­ser­v­a­tive imagery. But, it was so beau­ti­ful, even more so in con­nec­tion with the nos­tal­gic evo­ca­tions I have of the images, but just so beau­ti­ful with the lovers stilled by their love for each oth­er. End­less­ly, stand­ing against the sun, they would gaze at each oth­er, struck by what Blake calls the “lin­ea­ments of grat­i­fied desire”.

Of course, it is the ‘90s I am speak­ing of, which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly want­ed to re-imag­ine a new­er cast of nation­al char­ac­ters, as well as push to desire for a degree of free­dom away from the dark images that Gen. Zia had left behind through his Islamiza­tion project. Youth of Pak­istan start­ed to cre­ate very excep­tion­al forms of music, singing about alien­ation (Milestones/Vital Signs), the need to recon­nect with Sufi cul­ture (Junoon), and exhibit­ing a cer­tain kind of agency amiss oth­er­wise (Jazba/The Trip/Praying Man­tis), to name just a few musi­cal bands I grew up lis­ten­ing. Oth­er mature artists, writ­ers, dancers and art direc­tors, who had left the cre­ative scene, came back to rein­vent it.

I go back to these images to catch up on lost sleep, which the doc­tors tell us is a new­er form of ill­ness shaped by neo-lib­er­al anx­i­eties. You can­not, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly speak­ing, catch some­thing like sleep; it is lost for­ev­er. We only suc­cumb to inward gaz­ing. It is a seda­tive hyp­not­ic, inward gaz­ing. And, images of stilled love with­out com­plex­i­ties are ther­a­peu­tic, an anti-dote to cap­i­tal­is­m’s per­cep­tion-dis­tort­ing machin­ery that dog­mat­i­cal­ly churns forms of mind­less­ness every hour of the clock, as Crary informs us.

Arshad Mah­moud gave music to the many plays I con­tin­ue to watch, which still my heart many a nights. I am often wok­en up by a fit of anx­i­ety, pres­sured by the temp­ta­tion to work hard­er, to erase pre­car­i­ty, to clutch a root as I fall in a dream, and then lull myself back to a love-inscribed neb­u­lous­ness with Mah­moud’s pulse-numb­ing music. So grat­i­fied I am that I know the alter­na­tive: eter­nal, still love, shaped like an embrace with the name of “hun­dred years of soli­tude”.

Soli­tude is a pre­scrip­tion of resis­tance, and it is a polit­i­cal tool. Imag­ine: by way of enter­ing a col­lec­tive form of soli­tude, we dis­ap­peared, even for a sec­ond, from our Face­books and twit­ters, en masse; dis­ap­peared from the spaces ren­dered polit­i­cal, which the Occi­dent uses as a form of sur­veil­lance to watch us. It would be like dis­ap­pear­ing com­plete­ly from with­in the walls of hege­mon­ic cul­tur­al imper­a­tives, spaces that are schiz­o­phrenic and claus­tro­pho­bic. It would be an upris­ing of a pro­found mak­ing, salient in that it decon­structs the very pro­gram­ming of social medi­a’s imag­ined pow­er. They tell us, social media is the new­er place to “prac­tice” sol­i­dar­i­ty. We prove them wrong.

Sol­i­dar­i­ty is not to be prac­ticed, as if it is a reli­gion. Sol­i­dar­i­ty is to be lived. So, to reg­is­ter our protest we dis­ap­pear, there­by arriv­ing, in con­text, at the onto­log­i­cal posi­tion from where we cre­ate our own “social medi­um”, which lacks trans­mis­sion of moth-eat­en polit­i­cal sound bites, but gains from the pal­pa­ble real­i­ties we live every day. Things we approach, we approach metic­u­lous­ly, in depth and med­i­ta­tion, becom­ing the anti-the­sis of what we ought to become, the degen­er­ates and wretched of the earth.

And, we feel, feel very still, unlike the car­i­ca­tures of dread-rid­den images we have become on those posters, dis­trib­uted by the phil­an­thropists, of African chil­dren gap­ing away from the vul­tures, and Mus­lim women look­ing for Hel­lenophilic civ­i­liz­ing. Last­ly, we love with a last­ing com­mit­ment, some­thing we are told is an ances­tral sin, and nev­er fail at rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing it.

Image: Andrew Bobir