![]() Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, are all passed along to the next heir.” As Danticat puts it, “I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children’s inheritance. It made few waves in 1979 when the massacre of either “less than ten” or “more than 10,000” (depending on whom you believe) lower-caste Hindu refugees from Bangladesh took place on the island, upon the orders of the Left Front government.īut buried stories have a way of coming forth, even if it takes a generation for them to emerge. Marichjhapi was meant to be the thumbprint that nobody knew of. “It always leaves its thumbprints on you sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.” What the body and mind remember “Misery won’t touch you gentle,” writes Edwidge Danticat in The Farming of Bones. It is a testament to the artistry of both authors that what we experience through their books is a sense of what it is to be driven to land’s end, with no way out but water. With both books set in landscapes that are crisscrossed by river and surrounded by sea, it matters not that one of these is a work of non-fiction, and the other a novel. Something is heightened in violence that takes place on an island. It is a tragic truth that refugees have been massacred and incarcerated, and continue to be massacred and incarcerated, in many places across the globe, but island massacres seem to have their own particular tenor and terror. Refugees are those who are made homeless, hounded, incarcerated, marginalised, and at times massacred, as part of the violent mission to force a teeming and complex world into the simple, clean contours of a national map. Marichjhapi,1979 to the Dominican Republic, 1937.īoth books lay bare the expulsions that lie at the heart of any nation-state, the hidden histories of people who cannot fit into either side of arbitrarily-created, ethnicised boundary lines. I read one haunting, electrifying book about a massacre of refugees on one island I’m transported to another haunting, electrifying book about a massacre of refugees on another island, one that is located a world away.īlood Island takes me to The Farming of Bones. Watch: How Cambodian runner Bou Samnang completed 5,000m race at SEA Games in an inspiring effortīooks are portals, to other places and times, and also to other books.Can two friends track down a killer and absolve themselves? From Odisha to Kerala, a bus of climate migrants.IPL 2023: At 41, MS Dhoni is striking the ball as well as ever has in his IPL career.Defamation case filed against former Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi. ![]()
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