Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

It all depends on what you want the map to show and what use you have for it. People talk about things being lost in translation, but things can, of course, be gained in translation, too. A cartographer might add things, such as borders, which may or may not have some physical manifestation on the earth. But even if there is a fence to mark the border in the world, that fence is not the same as the political border represented on the map: A break in the fence doesn’t vitiate the political border. After all, the red line on the map doesn’t represent the fence and, in fact, the fence itself only represents the border.

But the point of all this is that all these representations or translations begin from needs. Consequently, the loss of information and understanding that every act of representation involves is the effect of an act of destruction that serves a need. We might appear to have taken a step forward, but in fact we took one step back and two steps forward. Every time we want to understand anything, we have to simplify and reduce and, importantly, give up the prospect of understanding it all, in order to clear the way to understanding something at all. This, I think, is true of all human inquiry.

* Zafar is referring to the International Security Assistance Force.

* United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

* Zafar is referring to the decimal representation of numbers: The number 2,743, for example, means three 1s, four 10s, seven 100s, and two 1,000s, each position indicating a successively higher power of 10.

* Used by the U.S. Army in the Second World War and the Vietnam War, the Mk2 defensive hand grenade was known as a “pineapple” because of the grooves cast into its shell, in order, it appears, to improve fragmentation while incidentally helping the grip.

* Oskar Morgenstern was an economist who, along with John von Neumann, founded game theory. Von Neumann was a formidable mathematician who made contributions in many fields. There is a story, in connection with Gödel, which says much about both Gödel and von Neumann. On October 7, 1930, on the third and last day at a conference in Königsberg, Germany, in the final graveyard question-and-answer session, Kurt Gödel announced his staggering theorem in one sentence, an off-the-cuff remark: There are indeed propositions which are true but unprovable. It went unnoticed by all but one; John von Neumann, visiting from the United States, buttonholed Gödel after the session. That is how Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem entered the world.

* Responding to the publication of the book One Hundred Authors Against Einstein , a work ostensibly directed at his physics, Albert Einstein said, “If I were wrong, then one would have been enough.”

* The 1971 Indo-Pakistan War broke out when India intervened after nine months of the ongoing Bangladesh Liberation War, during which India was overwhelmed by refugees from the new nation. One somewhat underreported aspect of this underreported war was American complicity. I repeat here a passage recorded in Zafar’s notes, which is an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens’s book The Trial of Henry Kissinger :

By 1971, the word “genocide” was all too easily understood. It surfaced in a cable of protest from the United States consulate in what was then East Pakistan — the Bengali “wing” of the Muslim state of Pakistan, known to its restive nationalist inhabitants by the name Bangladesh. The cable was written on 6 April 1971 and its senior signatory, the Consul General in Dacca, was named Archer Blood. But it might have become known as the Blood Telegram in any case … It was not so much reporting on genocide as denouncing the complicity of the United States government in genocide. [Hitchens describes it as “the most public and the most strongly worded demarche from State Department servants to the State Department that has ever been recorded.”] Its main section reads thus:

Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backward to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the U.S.S.R. sent President Yahya Khan [martial law administrator, based in West Pakistan] a message defending democracy, condemning arrest of a leader of a democratically elected majority party, incidentally pro-West, and calling for end to repressive measures and bloodshed … But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.

* The Redskins were a 1980s skinhead band, whose members espoused left-wing antiracist values.

* Zafar’s recollection of this incident differs from mine slightly, but in a key respect. I was present at the time, at the counter in the dining hall, standing two or three persons away from him. Zafar asked for a main course and Steven replied, Yes, sir. But contrary to his account, at that point Zafar didn’t just ask Steven to call him “Zafar.” He said: Steven, when you say “sir,” I look for my father. Please call me Zafar.

I cannot imagine that Zafar ever addressed his father as “sir.” I doubt he ever addressed him in English.

* Here I imagine that the second time Zafar used the pronoun, when he gave it emphasis, he was using it with an initial capital letter.

* “The Chaconne,” wrote Brahms, “is the most wonderful, unfathomable piece of music. On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

* In fact, the director’s response was first to set the question in the broader problem of an actor trying to convey mental or emotional states generally. She mentioned the name of Duchenne, a French neurologist of the nineteenth century, who had identified certain facial expressions exhibited by everyone, that, he concluded, were involuntary, including a particular smile, now known as a Duchenne smile, which cannot be created by a person but is the involuntary effect of an emotional state. The particular muscles involved in expressing this smile cannot be consciously willed into action; they’re activated only when someone is genuinely very pleased. Before I could ask this actress-turned-director how she’d heard about this nineteenth-century French neurologist, she explained that Duchenne’s work was of enormous interest to the Russian director Constantin Stanislavski, the father of method acting. The problem Stanislavski identified was how an actor could convey emotions whose corresponding facial expressions could not be willed.

When I asked Zafar, one day, why the photo of Emily in Penelope’s house had horrified him, he replied that she’d had a Duchenne smile. Even children born deaf and dumb, he said, burst into luminous smiles. I’d never seen her smile like that at me.

* I did not keep the napkin but have reproduced the diagram after consulting pages on the Internet. Of course, the diagram also appears in Zafar’s notes, where beneath it are the words Knowing doesn’t fix things. When he wrote those words, I have wondered, was he referring to a specific thing, something he came to know, which was an answer to a question but which never resolved things for him?