“Selflessness is a rare virtue, because it doesn’t pay for itself.”― Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children.
In this civilization of patriarchy, we grow up hearing numerous fables of heroic deeds by men. They are the warriors, generals, patriots, kings and nobles. Since the era of fairy tales to today’s Hollywood or Bollywood movies, generally men play the role of the ‘heroes.’ They rescue people from fire, flood, or any sort of catastrophe.
One single hero saves the ‘heroine’ through fighting with dozens of armed goons- particularly in the movies of this sub-continent. You, however, may find the female protagonists taking part in fighting sequences in some Hollywood or Chinese Martial Art movies.
The history books too are full of men’s heroism! They go to the forefront of the war with rifles upon their shoulders and free the subjugated land. The history of our Liberation War in 1971 is also not much different except for a handful of women guerilla fighters like Taraman Bibi, Kankan Bibi, Asha Lata Baidya, or Noor Jahan Begum.
This is why history is always ‘his-story’ and hardly ‘her-story.’ Homer depicted the tale of Penthesilea, the Amazon woman who was a cousin of Trojan hero Hector and sided with her uncle King Priam of Troy after Hector’s death on the battlefield. Furiously, she managed to kill a good number of Greek heroes but ultimately was defeated and slain by Achilles, whom no man, too could beat in his time.
Or imagine the courage of Pritilata Waddeddar (5 May 1911-24 September 1932), who is now remembered for leading fifteen revolutionaries in the armed attack on the Pahartoli European Club (1932) under the guidance of legendary leader Surya Sen. One person died and eleven were wounded during this fight, and Pritilata committed suicide by taking cyanide.
Still except a handful of stories of ‘heroic’ women, generally women are always portrayed in art-songs-literature-movies-fairy tales in ‘passive/submissive/reproductive’ role. She is the ‘sleeping beauty’ whom a ‘Prince Charming’ will awaken from sleep by changing the magic wands, she is the ‘Snow White’ whom the first brothers’, like seven dwarfs, and then again a ‘Prince Charming’ will save from all the jealous and envious, crooked plans of a bitter step mother.
Can a woman do anything on her own? Specially something very courageous? No- she is the platonic sweetheart of the freedom fighter (Asaduzzaman Noor was the cast), like Bipasha Hayat in the character of ‘Apala’ in Agooner Parashmani. She is the mother or caregiver, the young woman turning to be a widow overnight, or a fiancée waiting for her beloved to come from war, but he never comes back! She may be the Sophia Loren in ‘Sun Flower’ whose beloved goes to fight in Russian, gets injured and cared for by a Russian woman, eventually falls in love with her and gets married to her.
Or imagine of Loren in another movie entitled ‘Two Women’ on the Second World War, where both she and her teenage daughter get raped. This is all about women! She can hardly transcend beyond these gender based stereotypes.
But what does ‘courage’ mean? Does ‘courage’ mean only holding a rifle upon shoulder and shooting at the opposition? Mao Tse-Tung wished the women of China to fight an armed struggle in his poem ‘Militia Women’:
How bright and brave they look, shouldering five-foot rifles
On the parade ground, lit up by the first gleams of day.
China's daughters have high-aspiring minds,
They love their battle array, not silks and satins.
Yes, definitely not silks and satins. As if women only live for ‘silks and satins!’ Okay- even not all the men too are soldiers and not all of them carry on five-foot rifles. But cannot the civilians ever be heroes? James Joyce sketched one single day in the life of a Dubliner or an Irish man and equated it with the ten-year-long sea voyage of ‘Ulysses’, the mythical protagonist of the Greek epic.
Hence courage does not always mean acting in fake scenes of Bengali movies where the hero alone defeats twenty, thirty or even forty goons from the opposition. During the Reagan-Gorbachev era, a political columnist of Bangladesh once satirically penned that only a Bengali film hero can quell all the ballistic and anti-ballistic missiles of both the USA and the USSR in simple bare hands. Then what is ‘courage?’
Courage is when one, Mahreen Chowdhury, mother of two kids and a teacher at the Milestone School and College, tried to save around 20 to 25 people from a blazing building on her campus. Hailing from Nilphamari, this simple woman in her very feminine attire, could be as brave as to rush back to the burning wreckage, as she understood that there were some students still in the building’s classrooms with already 80 percent burn in her body.
She, however, was in an advantageous position as she had been standing at the entrance to Milestone School and College in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, preparing to hand the second- to fifth-grade students over to their parents.’ But within the blink of an eye, a Bangladesh Air Force Fighter jet crashed into a two-storied building, bursting into flames.’
No, Mahreen had not to wear jeans or western costume to become ‘courageous’ but all she needed to be brave was to have an impossibly human heart- profound love for her students and sincere commitment to her responsibilities as a teacher (I don’t mean that I am against wearing jeans and rather I love wearing a jeans jacket in the days of winter or heavy monsoon).
We come to read her colleague’s statement that she had never left the campus without ensuring the safe exit and handing over of every child to its parents or guardians from the school after the school hours came to an end.
Reportedly, Mahreen had served in Milestone for 17 years and was promoted to the ‘Coordinator’ position in the Bangla department from a class teacher position. She used to live in Uttara with her spouse, Mansur Helal, and their two sons: Ayan Rashid Miaaz (16) and Adil Rashid Mahid (6).
Mansur Helal’s interview was tough to bear: ‘When I went to the ICU, I asked her Why have you done such a thing? You have two kids of your own. She replied: ‘But they too are my children. How could I leave them?’ Then she told me to hold her hand- how could I hold it? Everything burnt into ashes- from her hair to her hand- she pressed her hand on my chest and uttered: Probably I won’t be able to see you any longer!’
Mahreen’s elder son has already conveyed his pride in his mother’s heroic deed. It is reported that in the process of rescuing the children, Mahreen succumbed to burns to almost 100% of her body.
And then comes the story of another teacher, Masuka Begum! When I first saw her photo on social networks and then in newspapers, it seemed like a character of Tagore’s play or songs had emerged before our eyes. A coy and gentle-looking woman in a sari or traditional attire of Bengali women, this 38-years lifelong spinster, Masuka Begum, devoted her entire life to teaching children.
Hailing from Chilokut village in Brahmanbaria Sadar upazila, she was the youngest of three siblings and obtained her honors degree from Brahmanbaria Government College and secured her master’s from Eden College, Dhaka. She joined as an English teacher in the primary section of Milestone School and College.
In a bid to save her students, she too fell prey to severe burns and later requested the hospital staff to send her corpse to her elder sister. ‘’She could have saved herself. But she tried to save the children first. Before she died, she asked that her body be brought to her sister's house. We fulfilled that wish," said Khalilur Rahman, her brother-in-law.
Her family is now demanding accountability. They called for an investigation into why flight training was being conducted in such a densely populated area.
Since reading the accounts of these two brave women of our time, I just continued recollecting the lines from Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and her children).’
Critic Oskar Eustis deems it to be the greatest play of the 20th century, penned by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). He etched the play in the context of 17th-century Europe during the Thirty Years’ War. The female protagonist (Mother Courage) actually carries on a pulling van with lots of provisions for sale to soldiers, and her children Eilif, Kattrin, and Schweizerkas ("Swiss Cheese") remain beside her.
The name of the central character, Mother Courage, was taken from the picaresque literary work of the 17th-century German writer Grimmelshausen. His female protagonist in the earlier brief novel, The Runagate Courage, too, pushes hard to make her way through the Thirty Years' War in Germany and Poland.
All throughout Brecht’s drama, the lady is often seen arguing with the soldiers, particularly when his first child Eilif is congratulated by a General for killing peasants or slaughtering their livestock. After two years, she is seen again to caution her daughter Kattrin against getting romantically involved with the soldiers when her third child and second son, ‘Swiss Cheese’, starts working as an army paymaster and the camp prostitute Yvette Pottier begins singing.
She rejects the marriage proposal from a General and badmouths the war after she notices her daughter Kattrin being ravished, slain and disfigured by an intoxicated soldier. But to save her business and mere existence, she does not always behave like a ‘tragic heroine’ of the Greek plays, and sometimes she behaves like a selfish person too.
Penned against the backdrop of the rise of fascism and Nazism and the invasion of Poland by Hitler in 1939, Marxist Brecht had no other recourse but writing it to chant the ‘mantra’ of courage.
All the dramatist had endeavored here to portray is the common people’s dream and resistance, love and resilience against the bitterest odds and agonies of our lives when the ‘Mother Courage’ utters: ‘In sum, victory and defeat both come at a price for ordinary people. The best thing for us is if there’s not too much politicking.’
Author: Audity Falguni is an author and a freelance journalist- right now she is working in the ‘Media Fellowship Programme’ on ‘Just Energy Transition in the RMG Sector of Bangladesh’ with Safety & Rights, supported by Oxfam of Bangladesh. She can be reached at [email protected]. Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
MSH
