A long night’s journey into morning

Aeschylus was the great Greek tragedian who was born in 525 BC. His reverence amongst Grecians and Romans was so much that they would call him the God-intoxicated man, and believed that God Dionysus had spurred him to write the drama. There are 90 dramas to his credit, of which only seven are accessible now.

It is the force of his imagination that even after two thousand years, we appreciate and find the tragedies as much relevant today as they were presented for the first time. It is incredible that the great tragedian had such presentiment that while portraying his characters’ tragedy, he had foretold that the same was in wait for everyone who would follow in their footsteps. Evidently, the Greek tragedians, on the back of their imagination, had premonition that the humanity would suffer despite its advancement and progress.

It would be appropriate if we recall Sophocles, the great tragedian of 496 BC, who was acknowledged to be the major dramatist of his times and without whose participation a drama festival would turn out to be a non-event. In a scene of his famous drama Oedipus Rex in which a group of supplicants is shown sitting before the altar, the old priest of Zeus is within the throng. Therefore, the obligation of imploring the benevolence of the king for the people of the realm is rested with him, so he fulfills it, saying: “Highness, you are watching with your own eyes the wild spread of plague in people of your kingdom that owing to its vicious onslaught, even the babies about to be born are not protected. And from its wrath, our assets of gems of the Cadmus family have disappeared from our eyes forever to be stacked in the Hades till the day of judgement.”

Is not the death gazing at us in the same way, as it once had done in the ancient Greece. However, in our case, its rhyme and reasons are numerous. And the ultimate of all is the apathy of the ruling elite which, unlike the Cadmus family of Athens, is ensconced in a bubble away from the dangers such as inflation and paucity of essential food item; even the lawlessness carries no threat to them. Their isolation from the poor is so well-rooted that now they can’t even listen to the cries, emanating from the nooks and corners of the country. It is a paradox that for some, honour, wealth and upkeep of children matter more than anything, while the majority is ready to barter them for two times bread. If the tragedies a common Pakistani experiences in his life span are put beside the tragedies of the Greek masters, ours will be far pathetic and heart-wrenching. That is enough to validate the presentiment of the Greek tragedians about the fate of the humanity. Unfortunately, in spite of being overwhelmed by the series of enormous devils, the agonies of the challengers go unwritten. In this case, the Jewish prisoners in the Nazi torture houses and camps were fortunate that not a single event of torture on them went unreported. In one such horror house, a prisoner dared to write with his thumbnails a plaint to God, on the walls: “God, on what sins and crimes, we are being punished by you. Despite your relentless punishment, we pray for pardon from you which you are not granting by ending our hellish imprisonment into the hole; we are in dire straits, have pity on us.” That came at last but in the gas chambers. We know since known time that the minority has to endure the consequences of the majoritarian rule; but ironically, in our case, it stands vice versa.

Let’s have a pause from our tale of woes and its comparison, and move on to the Europe of 1818, where the war of Waterloo was fought and lost by Napoleon. As a result of his and his adversaries’ senseless handling of the war, the length and breadth of Europe had been turned into a deserted expanse, and it should have been the case after the immense loss of lives of young soldiers and civilians. The countries, through which the Napoleonic and his enemies’ armies had passed, were ravaged beyond imagination. As there had been left nothing but heaps of filth and rubbish. The peasants and the land-owning gentry were the worst victims, as they were not getting back even the actual return on their harvest of wheat and other crops. There was a virtual reign of hunger everywhere in Europe, which had become soulless. During those dark days of extreme deprivation, the poor had only one support in the feature of religion. But the upper classes had been rudderless because most of them had lost their trust in God and the day of the judgement. Frankly speaking, if we keep in mind the devastation traversed across the planet earth in 1818, we would have become incredulous as well. Regardless of the unprecedented inhumanity and deep scars of the war, wounded Europe stood up to live again.

Jawahar Lal Nehru, one of the founding fathers of India, says, “The subjects a country discusses with its people displays its political advancements while its failure arrives due to its inability to ask the correct questions to itself.” The people of Europe put up correct questions to itself about what happened and what was going to happen in future. Consequently, they began a life that enraptured the world. In a nutshell, psychology masters from Freud to John Dewey agreed: it is the question that is more important than the answer. Insofar as we as a nation are concerned, we still avoid asking questions about our collective self. Have not we become our own hostages? Eleanor Roosevelt explains: “Nobody can inflict trouble on you, without your permission.” Also the great sage Gandhi goes a step forward, when he adds more to the American: “They cannot rob us of our self-respect until we hand it over to them.”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 17^th, 2022.

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