C T Online Desk: On May Day today, a prayer wells up from deep within our souls. It is a prayer which goes out to the souls of the hundreds of our compatriots in whom life has been snuffed out at their workplaces over the years. These were people who lived honest lives, did not know the meaning of deceit, had absolutely no comprehension of the meaning of hypocrisy.
These were the poor children of poor parents; and they were the struggling fathers and mothers of children who needed to keep their heads above the water in the everyday battle for a dignified place in the sun. Dignity came to these dead, as long as they lived, in incremental manner. Or not at all.
Life did not treat these honest souls well. And death took a huge swipe at them, in Savar, indeed in industrial complexes which depended on the nimble movement of their fingers across those clothes-making machines. It is to these dead that we dedicate May Day today. We do not promise their souls a new dawn, for they did not know the meaning of poetry emerging from the womb of night.
It was at dawn that these men and women, under-nourished and hungry and tense and emaciated, trekked down the long miles to the factories that gave them a pittance of a livelihood and a surfeit of cruelty.
A Prayer Rises from the Soul
On the thin, bent shoulders of these men and women depended the future of hundreds of others — spouses, children, siblings, parents. It was a tall order they constantly came up with. It was a short life they were destined to live out through the incongruities of the times.
They never read the poetry painted across the dawn sky. For they knew their dawn was but a tiring walk into the darkness of night.
This morning, May Day is a dirge in remembrance of the poor, those among the huddled masses, who have died or have been maimed for life at Tazreen Fashions, at Spectrum, at Smart Fashions, at Rana Plaza.
The dead do not know that in their passing has come living death for those they have left behind. The living mother has no way of consoling the weeping child.
That the child’s father is gone for good is a harsh truth the grieving mother has perhaps never revealed.
The tear-drenched child holding up the fast-fading image of its father in the twilight silence of the fields of death waits for parents who lie crushed beneath the slabs of concrete. Those slabs bear all the tell-tale signs of corrupt living on the part of the greedy, on the part of the nouveau riche. Every dead man and woman under those stones is an indictment of the despondent society we are tragically part of.
Today, the souls of the dead in Chicago’s Haymarket will tiptoe down to the desolation eerily enriched by the souls of the dead in Bangladesh and in every country where exploitation and poverty have always been at ugly play.
All these years after Chicago, history remains witness to the harsh truth — that the poor suffer through the centuries, that they have precious few friends among the society of the happy and the contented and the sybaritic. These poor, dead and living, will suffer as they have suffered through the long twisting, winding journey of history.
On May Day, it is to the wretched of this land and of this world that we speak. Someday the light of hope will emblazon their skies in glory. Someday social justice will define their lives. Someday the stars will shine bright across the heavens.
