2 - Voicing Silence, Embodying Absence. Forcefully Disappearing Bodies in Bangladesh.

On 12 June 1996, Kalpana Chakma, general secretary of the Hill Women's Federation of Bangladesh, was forcefully disappeared by army personnel stationed in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs) of Bangladesh. Despite the appeals in Court, the latter insisted that her body should be provided as evidence of the alleged crime, or that Kalpana herself should appear in Court as the real witness of her own disappearance. Beyond the absurdity of her case lies the harsh reality of the struggle of the indigenous people of Bangladesh, whose lives are plighted by the militarization and the exploitation/expropriation of their lands.

Enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings have become a recurrent tragedy that affects artists, intellectuals, dissidents and ‘minorities’ in Bangladesh. Through the dialectical interplay of silence/voice and presence/absence, I look at the indigenous (especially female) body as a site of resistance and a discursive space for reversing marginality and creatively intervening in the production of imagined alterities and alternative imaginations. 

The materiality of Kalpana’s body and the power of her written voice (consigned to her Notebook) turned her image into a haunting presence of sublimated materiality. Her absented and silenced body appears spectral and powerful, a fearless woman body amidst fearful bodies of soldiers and settlers. Indigeneity and feminist rights are tactically/tactilely reclaimed through the performative body, its processual corporality and the emotional world that sustains it. A sensoryscape of bodily practices, subtle perceptions, and deep emotions is ultimately embedded in her corpus of writings and her transubstantiated body of hyperreal materiality.