Seven Screams into the Silence.

A talk for the exhibition by Sujatro Ghosh called The Silenced Market at MARKK (Hamburg)

Scream I: Hunger

Those who don’t know it, don’t know it. I did a story once about hunger in the slumlands of outer Delhi. Along its streets, the high walls of factories hide the narrow alleyways that connect the homes of the workers, the harshness of it all, the factories and homes on top of each other – sweating the heat of production into the endlessness of social reproduction. Class struggle happened occasionally in the strikes of the exhausted workers, but it also took place in the violence within their homes – hungry people angry at each other, and angry at themselves, leisure a foreign word and silence impossible. If the thudding of the factories was not so endless, so would be the sounds of workers as they listened to videos or music at volumes beyond the capacity of their phone speakers. The workers learn a lesson early in their lives: hard work does not make you rich but only keeps you from being destitute. There is a gigantic wall that divides the world of the rich from the workers. The experience of being rich was outside their lives, alien to them. Ashis, from Bihar, told me: bhai, what can I say? You asked me what it feels like to be hungry. I want to ask you what it feels like to be full. Even overfull. So full that you cannot eat anymore.

Scream II: Starvation

The Israelis stopped the genocide for a brief instant. They felt that they had removed the Palestinians from northern Gaza, left them huddling near the Egyptian border. But then, on 27 January 2025, a million brave Palestinians began a walk along the Mediterranean road to their homes or at least to the streets that now had the rubble of their homes. They defeated the Israeli plans with their boldness and soon negated the impact of the genocide. They were back in Gaza City. The chairs of Al Baqa café that was along the beautiful sea filled up once more as artists and journalists chatted with each other about the genocide and what would befall them. And then, the Israelis used the one weapon against the Palestinians that struck them as hard as the US-delivered 500 lb bombs: starvation. Everything ended. The water, the electricity, the food delivery: Gaza was under a medieval siege with no reserves in the castle. It was hideous, utterly unthinkable. The United Nations tried to reach the Israelis, but no-one in Tel Aviv would take their calls. Bombs continued to fall, and then the growls of the stomach began to take their toll: starvation deaths, one of the worst ways to die, began to kill the children. Gaza already had the largest number of child amputees thanks to the Israeli bombing, but now there were children wrapped in their shrouds who weighed a fraction of their body weight from even a year ago. Famine began its march through the bombed-out streets. Monopoly firms in the North Atlantic are complicit. Francesca Albanese’s new report on the Economy of Genocide has the details. In late June, the Israelis bombed Al Baqa café, killing thirty-four people who were just sitting there, since the café had no food to offer. Among them was a young artist named Frans al-Salmi whose favourite line was that she was ‘drawing the untold’. Now she is there.

Scream III: Efficiency

At the edge of the memorial at Buchenwald, outside Weimar, is a rectangle of stones that used to be a stable. The Nazi guards converted the stable into a killing factory. At one end, they placed a scale to measure height and drilled a hole in the scale so that it would be somewhere near the necks of those being measured. One by one Soviet Red Army soldiers walked into this stable, stood at the measuring scale, and were shot to death in the neck. One by one, eight thousand four hundred and eighty-three soldiers, farm boys really, faced this terrible fate. This was the cool science of death. And eight thousand four hundred and eighty-three times, young German farm boys shot them in the neck. There was probably no pleasure in it. A decade ago, I spent the night in an al-Qaeda camp in Syria and learned from them that there was no pleasure in killing. It was an ugly matter. They were boys too, young men from Algeria and Tunisia, and homesick for their ordinary lives after a brief period of excitement. It was Captagon that kept them going, not adrenalin. I have never killed a human being. When I was a young boy, I went to the Jim Corbett Park with my friends and stayed in the government guest house. The caretaker asked us what we would like for dinner, the choices being vegetable curry or chicken curry. We chose chicken. Well, he said, you see these chickens here. Kill one of them and you can eat it. So, I was delegated to kill the chicken. It was easy enough to catch, but then hard to kill. I tried several times to twist its neck, but it seemed to get out of my juvenile grasp and peck my hands. Eventually, the pain of its pecks annoyed me so much that I put my strength to work and twisted its neck till it cracked. I could only eat rice and daal for dinner. The chicken curry was enjoyed by my friends. The sight of that chicken fighting me was enough. I can’t imagine taking a pistol and shooting an innocent young boy in the neck. But that is what one farm boy did to another. Perhaps the experience of slaughtering a pig had made them inured to violence, but I doubt it. I think that they cried into their bunks at night and lived with nightmares till the bombs fell on them one day and took those nightmares away.

Scream IV: Aesthetics

A few months ago, in Sudan, a photographer was taking a picture of a starving woman in a relief camp, when a journalist nearby said – why do we document this suffering and not just go somewhere and drive a bus load of bread to this camp? The photographer answer, because you and I won’t be able to get enough bread to this place and besides, whatever we can bring in will be stolen by one or the other of the sides in the civil war. The conversation felt cynical. Neither are cynical people. Both are veterans of wars and suffering, their cameras and computers on alert to tell an indifferent world about what they had seen and heard. Harder to get the stories from these places taken seriously amidst the terrible noise of nonsense that has captivated the world. Both the journalist and the photographer suffer from the pain of that indifference: they file their stories and their pictures and get little in return. The map of the world leaks with evil and there are names for this evil, from Khan Younis to Zamzam – unfamiliar names, beautiful names, Khan Younis meaning the caravanserai of Jonah and Zamzam meaning the well in the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, both sanctuaries for food and water, but now names of places of death and destruction. If my picture is published, said the photographer, then it would be seen by people who will perhaps be moved to fight against the conditions of life in places like Zamzam. But the journalist was not so certain. The picture has become a cliché. It means nothing. Nor does the story. People are hardened. They see something that they have seen before and then say that there is nothing that they can do, even if the picture is terrible. Or the story. Why do we report if it makes no difference? An event in Germany is shut down because the speakers want to talk about Gaza. A gallery in Spain is told that it cannot show pictures from Gaza. A journalist gets an award but is cautioned not to mention Palestine in his speech. A UN Special Rapporteur is to speak in Bern but is told that she cannot, because the event is not balanced. The photographer has the woman in his frame. He is ready to push the shutter release button. But he pauses. He is thinking about what the journalist has said. Then he clicks the photograph. Screw it. He wants the picture to be somewhere. Even if only on his Facebook page. What else can he do?

Scream V: Half-Insane

Chittaprosad, a self-taught artist from Chittagong, documented the famine of 1943 at its epicentre, in Midnapur (in western Bengal). A note in the Communist paper People’s War says of Chittaprosad that the ‘love of the people is the strength behind his brush’. Years later, Chittaprosad was clearer in his sense of why he drew what he drew: ‘I was forced by circumstances to turn my brush into as sharp a weapon as I could make it’. The most important part of that sentence is the phrase as sharp a weapon, not the sharpest weapon or the best weapon, but only as sharp a weapon. You can only do what you can do, and you can tell yourself to do more than you can do. Chittaprosad was in Bengal with the artist Zeinul Abedin, the photographer Sunil Janah, and journalists from People’s War, such as Kalpana Dutt. In his reporting, Chittaprosad talked to starving peasants and jotted down their stories in his sketchbook. It was not enough to draw the people. He had to tell their stories, to remember their world. One drawing of a woman – Sarajubala Kaibarta – and her son – Sumanta – shows them sitting in the veranda of the Supply Godown in Barabazar. They share this small space with twelve women and six men. ‘The place is horribly stinking from the undressed ulcers, dysentery, rotten fruits and fishes and from the gutter down below’, Chittaprosad jots down behind the picture. It is preferable to the destitute home or the government relief hospital. There, the people say, ‘they treat us like vermin, they hate us’. A man sits, staring into the distance. ‘His whole family is wiped out while he is left behind’, Chittaprosad writes, ‘a half-insane beggar eating the food given him by an Indian Army Havildar’. Who is this man? Does he have anything to do with the ‘shrivelled-up woman, sitting under a dead banyan tree with her bony hands resting on a pitcher while the hot midday sun blazed overhead, with not a sign of water everywhere’? I imagine that just outside the frame stands Kalpana Dutt, the communist activist, eager to talk to the survivors, eager to form them into relief committees to fight for food and medicine, to build the units of the communist party. She meets the half-insane man and the shrivelled-up woman. They form the newly expanding Indian communist party, which stands against fascism, imperialism and the other brutalities of the modern age. The man, after all, is only half-insane.

Scream VI: Memorials

There is a statue to Winston Churchill near the British Parliament. Some years ago, I was invited to the parliament to speak to some members about what had been happening in Mozambique. It was a sparsely attended gathering. But when I stepped outside and walked in the gardens, I ran into Churchill. I looked at the statue for a long time, eager to throw something at it, or paint his face in red. Churchill was one of the people responsible for the Bengal Famine of 1943 when at least three if not five million people starved to death. British colonialism began with a famine and ended with one. The English East India Company took Bengal in 1757 and then because of their theft of the produce of the land, oversaw the Famine of 1770 when a third of the people in Bengal died. Then, in 1943, four years before colonialism ended, the British engineered a famine that resulted in the death of millions – a famine that means nothing to Britain which has forgotten it in the haze of its own amnesia. When I was a young boy in Calcutta, I would regularly go past the Victoria Memorial in the heart of the city. The Memorial was built between 1906 and 1921 to commemorate the life of Victoria, Empress of India between 1876 and 1901. During her reign, while the British drained the wealth of India, the peasants experienced famines in 1876-1878, 1896-1897, and 1899-1900 – millions of Indians dying across the country. Between 1891 and 1920, fifty million excess deaths occurred in British India – fifty million. The Victoria Memorial does not seem to me with all its opulence to be a memorial to Victoria as much as a memorial to the famine deaths of the British Empire. Right in front of the memorial hall is George Frampton’s bronze of a grumpy Victoria sitting on her throne, looking down at the pebbles. It is infrequent to see her without a crow on her head, absurd in its own way. The statue might be retired. It might be better to keep the plinth and produce a bronze from one of Chittoprosad’s drawings, perhaps the half-insane man and the shrivelled-up woman – now on the march for a better world. It is fitting that the lawns of the Victoria Memorial are now largely used by young lovers, kissing on the benches, or – the more adventurous – having sex in the bushes. Humans find a way to prevail.

Scream VII: Space

Scientists say that outer space is a vacuum and that sound – let alone screams – cannot be heard out there. But scientists from alien civilisations that study earth tell us that it is on earth that the screams cannot be heard.