SCENE FIVE Opacity ۳
How to attend to a livingness undeterred by meaning? Who pays the toll for legibility?
In our academic contemplations, we mistakenly take for granted the qualities that make us human. These include the ability to form meaningful relationships, negotiate care, and experience a moral life despite adversity. We are, however, inclined to describe the human experience far more precisely, clinically, and intellectually, allowing our scientific impulses to separate, categorize, and label. The practices and processes of life are at risk of being lost in this way of working.1 Reductive modes of deciphering include the modalities of testimony, evidence, and reparation, which establish trauma as a valid moral category pushing for the political and cultural recognition of its victims and survivors. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman remind us that it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that psychic trauma, an object of suspicion till then, came to matter.2 While it is somewhat useful to set apart our protagonists in calculated ways—to highlight the extraordinariness of their experiences—we may unknowingly contribute to their dehumanization, reducing them to somebody entirely else. These faulty new personas we create are at risk of being noncomplex, quite ready for co-option by straightening and sensemaking regimes of disciplinary knowledge. Rima Berns McGown reminds us that the ground we stand upon—the frameworks, arguments, and assumptions we use—“informs the questions that we ask, the voices we adopt, the stories we tell, and the way we tell them.”3
Admittedly, we have come full circle, first by investing thought in establishing the very vocabularies of victim and survivor and then by allowing their absorption back into everyday sensibilities, fearing that we may have overlooked the ordinariness of the spaces where much of life’s work is enacted. Curiously, as academics, we are engaged in an inherently fraught intellectual project that disembowels and defragments life and then painstakingly pieces it back together.
Édouard Glissant talks about the right to opacity.4 Glissant argues that the unknowability of our interlocutors must be protected to limit the overtures of imperial knowledge production—even if this is at odds with the analytical ambitions of academic writing, which mistakenly, and often sincerely, assumes that difference can be resolved if understood. Opacity is an ethical stance against domination; it is unknowability and hence a poetics. It is ontology: an aesthetic that works against the schemas of legibility and representation “that prevent sufficient understanding of multiple perspectives of the world and its peoples.”5 Opacity is refusal: “what it means to refuse the terms given to us to name [our] struggles.”6
To elaborate on these concerns, I turn to Chandni bibi. Contrary to the claims of her family and others around her that she has struggled with her vision since childhood, Chandni bibi insists that the earthquake rendered her blind. She describes this experience as a “taking away of light, brightness, and illumination.” I juxtapose the seemingly mundane details of Chandni bibi’s life with the calm, incremental, accretive violence of the earthquake, as well as the conditions of chronicity that shape and constrain her. Rob Nixon asserts that much environmental violence takes place gradually and often invisibly, and new dimensions of life and politics can be brought to the fore if we pay attention to the attritional lethality of crisis and change.7
Reading the earthquake against the features of her life and sociality makes it possible to consider that Chandni bibi embodies the quake in her blindness, where bodily memory, biography, and social history have merged. In this way, I seek to reveal the ordinariness of repair work—which is rarely achieved through some grand transcendent gesture but via an embrace of and hold on the ordinary.8 Chandni bibi’s story is an achingly human one, mired in quotidian details. By focusing on how she understands her encounter with the earthquake, I offer alternatives to interpreting her experiences in purely clinical and reductive terms, routinely presented in interventionist discourses on disaster survivors. In her insistence that the earthquake led to her vision loss, Chandni bibi ensures that the quake is not reduced to an “event” that can be temporalized and resolved in ways that demand “moving on” as the only next logical step. This allows us to reconsider our assumptions of temporality, chronology, the singularity of life and event, and their unfolding.
As elaborated in the book’s opening, I arrived in the pahars with plenty of disciplinary baggage, troubled by an unresolved past as a humanitarian worker. I found Chandni bibi using conventional markers of vulnerability, such as “disability,” “extreme poverty,” and “old age,” arbitrary categories commonly used to demarcate and sift through “target” populations after humanitarian emergencies. Coincidentally, Chandni bibi is also considered “worthy of sympathy and kindness” by her community because she is blind, single, and “beyond marriageable age.” After obtaining permission from her and her family, I enter their home. She is not comfortable with my presence. This is indeed an intrusion. I ask her name. She hesitates: “My name is Chandni; the earthquake extinguished the light of my eyes.”
Who Is Chandni Bibi?
Quiet laughter and a contemplative silence—which should not be mistaken for a failure in communication—steadily punctuate our conversations. Chandni bibi’s quietness can be understood as a deliberate reaction to the astonishment and incredulity of being consulted and the peculiar insistence of my questions.
Centrality of Home
Home is a necessary constant for Chandni bibi. It reflects the materiality of a familiar space and actively structures her social relations and everyday life. Home and its implied constancy allow Chandni bibi to remain anchored in the very same house and village where she was born.
Taking over for her parents, Chandni bibi’s younger brother now heads the household, which includes his wife and their children. Chandni bibi explained: “We have been living here since the beginning with our parents; we have no other place to call home.” Their home is at a distance from other members of their extended family:
We are the only ones here. Our relatives used to live close to us before the earthquake but moved away shortly after. Now they rarely come to visit us. When they do come over, we enjoy their company. They tell us about their lives, and we share with them some of our stories. I haven’t been to their house in over two years.
The limited degree to which Chandni bibi and her household are embedded in their extended family signals the fragile and fragmented nature of their social. It also highlights the extent of the disruption that followed the earthquake, which in addition to causing material destruction and loss of life, reorganized social relationships, often permanently. This is significant for Chandni bibi, who is unable to visit her now-dispersed relations because of her visual impairment. Chandni bibi’s home, however, continues to serve as a nucleus for her relatives and other women in the village: “There are no places as such which are easily accessible to us [without intense public scrutiny] or where I can freely go. The women come here to our house; we sit together, chatting and laughing.”
Relationships of Care
Chandni bibi’s attachment to her home is partially cemented by memories of her parents. Her mother died when she was very young, and Chandni bibi offered only a limited conscious recollection of her: “I was very young when ammi died. I couldn’t even walk; I couldn’t get from one point to another [pointing at two opposite corners of the room]. Maybe I could have walked just a little bit. I was perhaps three years old when she died [gesturing with her hand how tall she must have been].”
Chandni bibi described the transitions in the household with the loss of her parents: “Ammi used to look after me, but then she died. After her death, abbu took care of me. When he also died, bhai took over this responsibility. Abbu died of old age.”
Chandni bibi elaborated her relationships via the functionality of care, defining both her parents and brother in terms of their responsibilities in looking after her. She did not explicitly elaborate on any emotional attachments with her parents. Still, her love for them is apparent throughout our conversations: “After the death of my parents, my life became very constricted.” Chandni bibi also spoke about her brother and his wife in a similar fashion:
After abbu’s death, bhai took care of me. I live with him; I have no place else to go; he is my only brother. Who else will take care of me, if not him? He provides for me. He works on daily wages [as an unskilled laborer], and at night he comes home with tea and sugar; this is how we survive. When I need something such as clothes or shoes, I ask him. He then gets them for me. I was delighted when he got married. I was glad that now a bhabhi (sister-in-law) would enter the family who will also look after me. Abbu arranged for his marriage and found him a bride; ammi was already dead. Bhai takes care of me; otherwise, I won’t survive.
Chandni bibi is concerned about her self-preservation. This is accentuated by fears about her visual impairment, being unmarried, her parents’ death, and the isolation of living far from any other relatives. She has concluded that she must always be taken care of. She has calibrated her relationships, including with her sister-in-law, in similar approximations.
Chandni bibi used the collective of the family to speak about herself. Her notion of family was inextricably tied to home both as a place of uninterrupted residence and as a space of familial continuity. When initially asked who lives in the house, she replied: “Me, bhai, ammi, and abbu.” Throughout our conversations, Chandni bibi often spoke in plural pronouns, referring to the collective of the family, which forms an important component of her identity.
Unfortunately, after the earthquake, familial ties beyond the immediate household did not translate into any form of assistance or comfort, further reinforcing Chandni bibi’s reliance on her brother. She shared her disappointment: “The Rabb is my witness. My brother is the only one who looks after me, no chacha (paternal uncle), or mamu (maternal uncle), not even the neighbors—nobody checks in on me.”
Comforting the Heart
Chandni bibi’s daily life closely revolves around her home. She spends her time praying, warming herself by the fireplace (which doubles as a stove), and resting on the charpoy. She explained: “This is my routine; it isn’t much. This is how my life passes. I also look after the children. I can’t do any ‘real work’; I mostly sit around all day.” She expanded on her relationship with her brother’s children: “Their mother leaves them at home, so I look after them. I like them. They don’t bother me as such, they are sometimes naughty, but my time passes. I guess there is little pleasure in my life.”
Chandni bibi is thus a caregiver, not only a care receiver. This awards her a place of responsibility within the household, allowing her to partake tangibly in homemaking. Chandni bibi, therefore, occupies a relational position of accountability, necessary for remaining embedded within the home.
Being quite aware of her limited mobility, Chandni bibi identified a few locations reachable by her outside the house: “I sit here [pointing toward a tree]. I come outside and sit under this tree to enjoy the sunshine and think, to comfort my heart.” Occasionally, Chandni bibi also visits her sister-in-law’s mother. These visits placate her heart, she explained: “There are only a few outdoor spaces that I can access. Sometimes my heart feels constricted [I feel unsettled]. To feel more grounded, I go to her house. She is also my chachi (paternal aunt). She is a good person. I don’t give or take anything from her. We sit together and talk; then I come back home. Visiting her makes my heart feel better.”
Chandni bibi inhabits her surroundings as best as she can. She frequently ventures outside her home, but only in the immediate vicinity. She invests in relationships—such as with her aunt and her brother’s children—as a means of keeping herself grounded and anchored within the familiarity and continuity of the family unit. Since she cannot visit relatives farther away, Chandni bibi places great importance on visiting her aunt. The visits offer the possibility of forming meaningful connections of her volition. More importantly, Chandni bibi is deeply invested in the project of taking care of her heart. This involves praying, forming meaningful and codependent relationships, and finding spaces near or around her home where she can be outdoors and can engage in reflective contemplation.
Sabr
As also hinted in scene one, winters are a complex phenomenon in the pahars. According to Chandni bibi, it is the most challenging time of the year. Winters restrict her mobility, already constrained by her visual impairment and the difficult topography, cementing Chandni bibi in her home in a somewhat ambivalent relationship: “When there is heavy rain or snow, life becomes very difficult. Most people can leave their homes and move around, while I remain stuck in this room. I feel very unsettled, but I keep my heart strong and practice sabr. The sunshine feels good in winter. It’s not like I can go places in any case, but when it rains, my heart sinks. I feel worried.”
Sabr is a comprehensive complex of Muslim virtues and dispositions. It is a combination of forbearance, endurance, diligence, perseverance, and restraint. It is the working of the heart and spirit (as opposed to only the body and mind). In the simplest sense, sabr is elaborated within Islam as remaining devoted to Allah and maintaining hopefulness despite adversity. Muslim traditions elevate sabr as a rite of passage, as the capacity to receive deeply and renew and refresh one’s beliefs, commitments, and orientations toward a life gifted by Allah. Sabr is the wisdom to accept the unexpected, not necessarily a giving in but as the cultivation of the inner resources needed to surpass and exceed the uncertain and difficult. Chandni bibi described her life during winters as a concrete embodiment of sabr. She also contended that the cold interfered with both her vision and her mobility: “My eyes don’t open in the winter; even now, I have difficulties keeping them open. In the summer, when it is warm, one can at least step outside; go here and there. But during winter, my eyes are sealed shut; even right now, my eyes hurt.”
Sensing she had ventured too far, Chandni bibi quickly grounded herself back into the material conditions of her life, indicating that the winter months pose a combination of material and existential troubles: “If during winters one wears warm clothes and warm socks, then one can get by, and it isn’t so bad. But if these all aren’t available, then how can one survive the cold?”
Even though Chandni bibi was grateful to her brother for providing the necessities of life, including allowing her to stay in his home and remain established within the family unit, the tensions that punctuated their relationship were also evident. When asked why she never sought treatment for her blindness, from either a medical doctor or a traditional spiritual healer, Chandni bibi responded: “Ever since my eyes lost their light, I haven’t sought any treatment. Well, ammi and abbu have died, so who is there to ask otherwise? My brother is good to me, but he also has his children to take care of. He brings his wages home and feeds his family and me. Perhaps, there is a cure for my blindness? Perhaps, there isn’t?”
Allah’s Mysteries
The earthquake was an event of unprecedented magnitude, rupturing common beliefs about the physical and social worlds and what stitches them together. Survivors were forced to confront displacement and large numbers of deaths; loss of property, livestock, and food reserves; and the destruction of livelihoods and agricultural lands. Also, the earthquake ruptured confidence in the permanence and stability of the physical and social worlds and the protections they previously guaranteed. Chandni bibi recalled her memory of the earthquake:
We were sitting outside in the courtyard, sifting through the maize, when the pahars started to quiver. We ran down to the riverbank. We spent the next few days by the river under the stars. We didn’t return home because we were scared the roof might collapse on us in our sleep. The possibility of the pahars collapsing terrified me. What if there is a landslide? What if the house fell? Several village houses had crumbled entirely, there was dust everywhere, and it turned very dark; I was terrified. Our animals died, the fodder we had collected for the winter, the boxes in which we store maize, our fields, our home, they were all crushed by the pahars. I don’t know why the earthquake occurred; only Allah knows. It is part of His workings. I don’t know of His mysteries.
A Changed Life
Chandni bibi insisted that when she was a little girl, she could see rather clearly and would play in the village just like other children: “I could make out everything, every minute detail.” She described her routine before she lost her vision: “I used to enjoy sweeping the floors and making roti. I could easily get around, no problem! I would get meals ready for the family, remove any rocks in the field brought down by the landslide, and even plow the earth, getting it ready in time for planting season. I would wake up in the morning, make chai, sweep the floors, make roti, and get the meals prepared.”
The earthquake had profound consequences for Chandni bibi; she holds it responsible for the loss of her vision. She contended: “Yes! My eyesight escaped during the earthquake. Now I can barely keep my eyes open. The earthquake forced the light out of my eyes. What can be more jarring than that?” Chandni bibi elaborated: “When a person closes their eyes, what is left? Nothing, just darkness; this is how my life has changed. My eyes are my most significant affliction. I am unable to feel happiness anymore. When Eid arrives, I feel upset; I can’t freely go out into the world or attend a wedding.”
Wayward Steps and Sideways Glances
The event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated.
—Allen Feldman9
For Chandni bibi, the earthquake’s most significant consequence was the complete loss of her vision. Other community members were fairly certain that Chandni bibi had difficulties with her vision since childhood. Her family also suggested this was the case, though they acknowledged that her vision worsened after the earthquake. Throughout our conversations, however, Chandni bibi insisted that the earthquake was responsible for her blindness. She delineated how the earthquake and its resulting damage to her eyesight impacted her ability to contribute to the household—essential for maintaining her place in the home.
How can we read Chandni bibi’s insistence that her blindness was caused by the earthquake? Paul Connerton argues that societies and individuals remember in multiple ways, including by incorporating social memory into the body.10 In their study of political violence and trauma during China’s Cultural Revolution, Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman explore how social disorientation becomes a bodily experience. They write:
Thus in the early 1980s, when we were conducting our research, we were impressed by the way that retelling narratives of sickness, especially of neurasthenia—a common syndrome of chronic pain, sleeplessness, fatigue, dizziness, and related physical symptoms, as well as sadness, anxiety, and anger—authorized social memory and thereby enabled oblique criticism of the Cultural Revolution and the political process generally, which our informants regarded to be the origin of the complaints.11
They continue:
In their narratives of illness, patients’ remembrance of bodily complaints broadened into more general stories of suffering that integrated memories of menace and loss with their traumatic effects (demoralization, fear, desperation) and with their sources (criticism sessions, beatings, prison, exile). Bodily memory, biography, and social history merged. The bodily axis of moral processes of social experience aggregated historical event, symbolic meaning, and social situations. The memory of bodily complaints evoked social complaints which were not so much represented as lived and relived (remembered) in the body.12
Drawing on Kleinman and Kleinman, we can read Chandni bibi’s blindness as an embodiment of the social and personal experiences of the earthquake, as well as a commentary on her limited embeddedness in her family and sociality. In her blindness, too, “bodily memory, biography, and social history merged.”13 The earthquake and the social incoherence it amplified extended from “personal anatomy to the social body, from the anatomical network of muscles, bones, nerves, and blood to the social network of interpersonal experience.”14 But, in addition to social critique, Chandni bibi’s insistence that the earthquake made her blind allows her to keep the “burden of the earthquake” in constant circulation, to not reduce the quake to a temporal event whose only resolution is to “recover” and “move on.”
Chandni bibi compels us to think more carefully about our relationship with time and sequence: beginning, middle, and end. She operates outside the burdening pressures of clock time. She compels us to see that the past lingers in the present, offering no clean breaks. And the future is both known and unknown; that is, one could guess how the future might unfold from a reading of the present, but its precarity means uncertainty is the only “stable” sensibility. In this way, she allows us to appreciate repair more carefully as atemporal or lodged within some other logic of time and direction. Repair, in this sense, is neither a return nor a forward orientation but wayward steps and sideways glances, spirals, and cycles—processual, a moving map—“something” that a desire for resolution and equilibrium cannot simply encapsulate.
A critical way Chandni bibi navigates the uncertainties of the future is through her spirituality and investment in taking care of her heart:
I like to pray. I perform them with the full attention of my heart; I feel peace. I don’t enjoy any act more than praying. I pray that Allah keeps us all in safety and under His protection. I pray that my eyes regain their vision and light. I don’t ask for anything else. I am hopeful that my vision will come back; the light will return to my eyes. Then my life will pass smoothly. I just hope Allah gives me this much because He is the only one who can give me such a gift.
Chandni bibi hopes to regain her eyesight to live life on her terms and participate in the critical task of homemaking. Through her spirituality, prayer, and sabr, she is able to maintain and extend hope and desire for the future and invest in the act of living in ways that matter deeply.15 Her efforts toward caring for her heart align with her aspirations for the future. She elaborated: “[If I regain my vision] I will continue to live with my brother. I long to immerse myself in my surroundings and visit my relatives, but I can’t do any of these without any light in my eyes. I just wish Allah could return my vision. This is my heart’s desire. If I can get my eyes back, that will be gold for me.”
Prognostic Uncertainty and Open Normativities
Chandni bibi’s bodily narratives of blindness are “her truths,” facts that govern her life and her emplacement within it. Her insistences that the earthquake diminished her vision are demands for opacity and restraint, an invitation to come to terms with her unknowability. Speculating on the loss of her vision, a staff member of the World Food Program remarked that perhaps she is deficient in some essential micronutrient, insisting on a purely physiological reason for her blindness, which a targeted nutrition intervention might rectify. This reminds me of Ally Day’s work on prognostic certainty. Day writes: “Prognostic certainty refers to the idea that once we diagnose a body (fetus, child, adult) with a condition, we can predict the outcome of that condition on the living subject, regardless of socio-cultural circumstances.”16 Following a similar logic, those in the medical establishment insist that Chandni bibi’s blindness is most likely a symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder and suggest that she receive an immediate psychological assessment.
What if we consider Chandni bibi’s engagement with the earthquake as enmeshed within her broader sociality without imposing any predefined parameters, which could limit our interpretations of her experiences? Instead of focusing on the event (the disaster) as a state of exceptionality external to her desires and lifeworld, I have focused on how the earthquake continues to linger and, more importantly, how Chandni bibi navigates these enduring consequences as rooted within the chronicity of life. In reading Chandni bibi’s experiences of the earthquake against the nuanced features of her daily life, it becomes possible to consider that she embodies the earthquake’s social and personal experience in her blindness. Carrying the burden of the earthquake ensures that it will never be forgotten nor rendered insignificant. For Chandni bibi, perhaps the continuation of life is not dependent on the erasure and reappropriation of past experiences but on their embracement. Her loss of vision is an important, necessary, and valid encounter with the spectacular experience of the earthquake and the stabilities of the physical and social worlds it challenged. Her narratives of blindness are forms of attunement: “The potentiality to become engaged with and become entangled in diverse and particular relationships that makes possible the vast diversity of ways of living we find in the social world.”17 In her blindness are opportunities for rearticulation and refashioning life and its containments to allow more genuine self-reflection consistent with the moving map she seeks to create.
Speaking from her work after the tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, Annemarie Samuels argues that bodily experiences reveal not only the significance of the body as a site of narrative but how “the body becomes the subjective site of the entangled relations between disorder and order.”18 Chandni bibi’s insistence that the earthquake was responsible for the loss of her vision indicates that disasters are lived, experienced, and embodied in multiple ways. She tells her story “through the body.”19 She challenges the very category of the static “disaster survivor,” a socially constructed identity dependent on limiting “human experiences of disruption to sterile, laboratory states” and disallowing “disrupted bodies from articulating their experiences in other expressions, styles, and embodiments.”20 Interestingly, Chandni bibi’s somatic response to the earthquake reflects similar claims made by others. Since the quake, several residents have reported having difficulty recalling immediate tasks and recent conversations, indicating a rupture in short-term memory. Others complained of a marked increase in body pains, aches, and stomach ulcers. Another interlocutor, also a long-term resident of the pahars, similarly reported a rapid decline in his vision. Like Chandni bibi, he attributed his visual impairment to the earthquake.
What does such an enrichment of Chandni bibi offer us? For one, it offers a departure from clinical and analytical precision that risks denying the less obvious or idiosyncratic ways life is lived and imagined. It allows us to consider the possibilities of life maps, desires, and crip21 futures that exceed or interrupt the logics that ground us in the world, where repair has only a singular, forward-looking orientation. A superficial reading of Chandni bibi mistakenly compels us to believe that repair is synonymous with the resolution of her blindness. I have attempted on many occasions to inquire with Chandni bibi’s brother about her medical history concerning her vision. The resolution to the matter appeared at times as ordinary as obtaining a pair of high-powered prescription glasses or getting simple cataract surgery. It quickly became apparent that her family (brother) was not necessarily interested in pursuing this medicalized route to a curative resolution. Or they had already exhausted that route, and my suggestions were presumptuous at best. Ambreen, my research assistant, who spent a lot of time with Chandni bibi, felt that it was more a matter of neglect, that Chandni bibi was an ignored, “extra” person in the household whom no one paid attention to. She described Chandni bibi as a ghost, a specter that has lost its capacity to haunt, reduced to unnoticeability. Unable to see Chandni bibi outside of her blindness, Ambreen felt that there was no real commitment to the resolution of her diminished vision by her family.
From a critical disability perspective, Eli Clare argues that cure is, at best, indeterminate and contradictory and can lead to diminishment and enhancement, and therefore it is only one of the many tools available for a sustainable future.22 Ally Day’s work on prognostic un/certainty, also mentioned earlier, helps us think beyond a curative resolution as a precondition for flourishing.23 Day argues that all bodies are fragile, enmeshed in complex social phenomena, and therefore prognostically uncertain; their bodily experiences cannot be predicted.24 This brings into consideration those open, multiple futures that are “not always and already hoping for and leaning toward a cure.”25 Alexis Shotwell writes: “It is not possible to ask what the future is.… There is never a determinate future, but instead, only a present that moves in relation to what we want to move toward.”26 In addition to social critique, biography, event, and experience, Chandni bibi’s blindness reflects ambiguity and openness, catalyzing movement toward a “present-future”—a way to sustain proliferations and open normativities: “crafted ways of being that shape subjectivities oriented toward widespread flourishing.”27 The scene elaborates these desires and navigational maps enacted in her assertions of blindness.
I met Chandni bibi only a few times. She is the only interlocutor I did not directly work with, doing so only through Ambreen. I never got a chance to get to “know” her other than from transcripts. “Chandni” translates roughly as “moonlight,” something reflected and reflective, something that illuminates but also needs to be illuminated. A mirror of sorts, which not only reflects social reality but also guides attention toward those textures of life that remain outside analytical purview, either because we choose not to acknowledge them or because we do not know how to. Chandni bibi is excessive and exceeding in this regard; her nonnormativity is striking. Her wholeness and partiality are urgent. The humanitarian machinery closed their file on the pahars just two years after the earthquake—wrongfully signaling “recovery.” But there has been no recovery for Chandni bibi: “My eyes didn’t have light after the earthquake, they still don’t [nothing has changed].”
Desiring/Demanding Legibility
Veiling and unveiling: isn’t that what interests them? What keeps them busy? Always repeating the same operation—each time, on each woman.
—Luce Irigaray28
I disagree with Ambreen’s reading of Chandni bibi, whom she described as a specter whose ability to haunt has faded. Chandni bibi certainly haunts me. Her body is a place of holding and haunting. Haunting, Avery Gordon suggests, is a means of knowing “what has happened or is happening.”29 Through her blindness, Chandni bibi calls attention to what lingers: uncertainty about her care and safeguarding. This is in sharp contrast to the story the humanitarian community presents, one of completion and closure. On the contrary, Chandni bibi refuses altogether the creation of a story reducible to a series of causes and effects and denies the perfect story.
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler problematizes the juridical expectations of self-narration valorized in legal testimony.30 Butler points to the impossibility of providing a coherent account of oneself and how an overemphasis on coherence facilitates certain forms of self-narration while silencing others. Antjie Krog and colleagues also challenge the juridical expectation of coherence in their poignant book There Was This Goat, in which they revisit a testimony rejected by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.31 The authors conclude that the testimony was dismissed not simply because it was incoherent and inconsistent but because it exceeded institutional logics and colonial frameworks. Thinking further about those who contest Chandni bibi’s claim that the earthquake rendered her blind, one can conclude that Chandni bibi is an unreliable narrator. But we are also unreliable readers, picking and choosing the parts that fit. Why does it matter if she is partially or completely blind, or sight-bearing? Or if she was without sight since birth? Why is such a blurring of the world frustrating for some? Sienna Craig reminds us that “reliability is not synonymous with truth” and that “being an unreliable narrator is not the same as being unbelievable.”32 Rather, unreliable narration “shirks the everyday investment required to believe in the possibility of someone else’s truth, however shape-shifting that reality may be.”33 Chandni bibi pulls the rug out from under the legs of our story, the account we are so desperate to construct—not hers. She stands behind her words and world: the earthquake took away her sight.
Chandni bibi is less a puzzle needing to be resolved, or a site of curiosity and intrigue, which is how I first came to her; rather, she exists in a relation of tension with our desires to render her legible. She is self-becoming as a survivor and self-surpassing, leaving others and the instruments of her rescue behind. Though many will try, she does not solidify herself as universally accessible or classifiable. Ethnographic attempts at legibility are a trespass. Chandni bibi prepares us for a mode of engagement that is not singularly devoted to coherence and legibility—a preoccupation for those in the academy. She reminds us that rendering the world knowable and, in that sense, conquerable is not always a noble commitment. Instead, she calls out the epistemological maps we rely on as writers and readers. What if these maps instead contradict, challenge, or undermine the routes to legibility to which we are so accustomed?
Building upon Eve Sedgwick’s ideas in Epistemology of the Closet,34 Nicholas de Villiers discusses opacity as a disruption of certain types of “privileged knowingness.”35 He positions opacity as a (queer) strategy “that is not linked to an interpretation of hidden depths, concealed meanings, or a neat opposition between silence and speech.”36 De Villiers clarifies: “Opaque and transparent—taken to their limits—don’t work as opposites, since for something to be fully transparent it would be invisible, and for something to be completely opaque would mean a complete blockage of vision altogether, another invisibility. So opacity is visible only outside of the purity of the opposition opaque/transparent itself.”37
The Opacity of Sabr
Sabr is also opaque. It is hard to see what one is so patiently waiting for—or what that waiting entails. In another scene, Niaz awaits the rebirth of his body, much as Chandni bibi awaits the return of her sight. Niaz approaches his recovery by taking on further education in anticipation so that when his bodily abilities bounce back—and they surely will—he is ready for employment. Chandni bibi’s mode of forbearance takes the form of further embeddedness within the rhythms of domestic life to make herself indispensable, such as by caring for her brother’s children. She is determined not to be the specter that Ambreen suggested her to be. Both Niaz and Chandni bibi are united in their expectations of a Divine agency and a tender yet inscrutable relationship with Allah.
Traditionally, women have differently borne the weight of sabr, especially when the concept is confused for accepting the world as is. For example, when it comes to an abusive marriage or chronic illness, women are sometimes instructed to practice sabr—a stance closely shaped by patriarchal norms rather than spirituality. Sherine Hamdy argues that we must “remain attentive to when, and under what conditions, acceptance of God’s will” is cultivated, rather than rejecting sabr altogether.38 Kaveri Qureshi notes that within sabr lies a “tension between self-sublimation and self-assertion”;39 it is both “inner strength that is directed towards God as well as a capacity that is granted by God.”40
Sabr, as I have understood from my interlocutors, is not only a capacity for endurance as commonly understood but also an opening of oneself to the paradoxical positions of impossibility, surprise, and certainty. It shifts the focus away from the guilt and unease of familial responsibility to Divine merit. In that sense, sabr can become the glue keeping the social intact. As Sattar Shah also demonstrates in his friendship with Allah in scene three, sabr inculcates a kind of sovereignty, an expectation from life that no one else can satisfy, rendering everything and everyone provisional and suspending advancement or any finality.
Sabr indicates another shape of time where durationality is deferred in favor of closeness and proximity—a “strange temporality,” as Jack Halberstam says, outside biological time and clock time.41 Sabr, as it manifests in Chandni bibi’s life, is where queer time and crip time converge, “occupying an asynchronous time”42 not defined by the lateness of arrival or the delayed fulfillment of desire. Sabr is minor affect—a relation to the social rather than a form in itself.
Survival and Flourishing
Toni Morrison reminds us that “the grandeur of life is that attempt.”43 She continues: “It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can and behaving as beautifully as one can under completely impossible circumstances.” Morrison notes that survival, endurance, and blossoming are compelling spiritually and intellectually; they make life elegant.
Whenever I have presented this scene, whether in a classroom, academic conference, or job talk, without fail, some members of the audience, upset, point out that Chandni bibi’s approach to life is a “maladaptation.” “Surely, this is not what flourishing looks like,” some will say. But Chandni bibi shows us that flourishing cannot happen outside the context of survival. Suppose flourishing and survival are set up as binary opposites. In that case, we risk qualifying one type of life that mirrors our expectations of the world as superior to another. We risk pushing to the margins modes of living that do not unfold in our own likeness. Survival accounts for much more than just subsisting as we tend to understand the word. Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes: “Survival has never meant, bare minimum, mere straggling breath, the small space next to the line of death.”44 Rather, “survival references our living in the context of what we have overcome. Survival is life after disaster, life in honor of our ancestors, despite the genocidal forces worked against them specifically so we would not exist.”45
As Morrison points out, survival is spiritual; this is also shown to us by Chandni bibi (and others in different scenes) through prayer and a beautiful stillness (that is, sabr). Chandni bibi’s survival is excellence. Recognizing this requires radically shifting our thinking and the anthropological gaze, demanding we confront the unsustainability of late capitalism and modalities of engagement that are failing rapidly before our eyes. Indeed, survival in the context of years of marginalization is no longer maladaptation. Dian Million reminds us: “We are living in a time when the most vulnerable die (this includes many, many life forms), a worldwide experience that affects our vital relations with life itself. There is a struggle against the capitalization, the commoditization of life even as it is happening.”46 In “A Litany for Survival,” Audre Lorde describes those “who live at the shoreline” as people who are always on the “constant edges of decision”; their life is in continuous flux as each decision is critical to what happens next.47 Those living at the shoreline, Lorde notes, cannot “indulge the passing dreams of choice” and must exist in the “now.”48 For those living at the shoreline, survival is a triumph because “[they] were never meant to survive.”49
Lorde is suggesting a future reconceived and reimagined in the hold of the here and now. I connect this with Gerald Vizenor’s work on Indigenous survivance.50 Vizenor understands survivance as the work of presence in the shadows of genocide and erasure. Diane Glancy links survival to creativity: “(Sur)vivance: Sur—a survival outside survival. Vivance—the vitality of it. It takes something outside survival to define it. It is a stepping away from it to look back at the surrounding vibrance.”51 Flourishing and survival are interlocked as unlikely interlocutors, inviting us to think about how newness enters the world, particularly when such a possibility does not appear forthcoming.
What Happens to Those Who Survive the End of the World?
Kathryn Yusoff writes: “The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialism have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence.”52 Arundhati Roy uses the metaphor of the portal to describe how the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed us to a new world altogether.53 For Chandni bibi, like others in the pahars, the world has already ended; the portal is crossed. We sometimes forget those who are “Still Here”54—those who survive the end of the world.