April, the cruellest month

April is the cruellest month, breeding

lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

memory and desire, stirring

dull roots with spring rain . . . .

from The Waste Land by TS Eliot (1922)

Few poems have such arresting opening verses as TS Eliot's best known work, 'The Waste Land'. But then may be it is just that some terrible things in the world take place in April.

As the illegal unilateral aggression of the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq enters the third week, we have yet to be presented with the scale of carnage, death and destruction that would conjure up images of a 'waste land'.

But April will likely prove to be the 'cruellest month' for Iraqi civilians caught between a ruthless dictatorship and a hyperpower bent o­n a new form of colonisation of the Middle East.

For those of us vaguely familiar with Eliot's poem, this is not so much a description of death and destruction o­n a grand scale that modern warfare is capable of even though the poet was deeply affected by the carnage in the trenches of World War I.

If o­ne were to search for this in the great works of art of the last century, o­ne would find it in the Guernica of Picasso, a contemporary of Eliot's. It depicts the atrocities visited upon the Basque townspeople of Guernica when the German Luftwaffe rained bombs o­n them during the Spanish Civil war.

'The Waste Land' is by no means an easy poem to digest. The poet's annotations notwithstanding, it is rendered more difficult with the sprinkling of verses in Latin, German and French, and its allusions to the works of Dante, Wagner and Baudelaire, as well as to Christian, Hindu and Buddhist traditions among others.

But these disjointed images speak of a moral wasteland owing to the weakening of spirituality and traditions in modern society.

If Malaysians can lay claim to excellence in any of the things we do, it is perhaps in the building of moral capital out of other people's misery.

We are the champions of the world's oppressed and exploited, of third world peoples unjustly denied a decent life by the greed of world corporations, and of innocent lives sacrificed in the quest of global domination by the world's o­nly superpower.

We think nothing of emptying our national coffers to hold an extravagant jamboree to tell the world of our disgust towards injustice as long as it is committed by others o­n peoples outside our borders. We could fill stadiums to show our solidarity with Iraqis and Palestinians.

That they need our help and solidarity as fellow human beings and fellow Muslims is not in dispute. But are we not consciously riding o­n other people's sufferings to help us in our continual mode of self-denial, in order not to countenance ourselves in the mirror and see the moral wasteland within?

Yes, April is the cruellest month even for some of us. April is the month when the sordid conspiracy of sex and sodomy was consummated when the judgment that "stinks to high heavens" was read out.

It was the day when the Malaysian judiciary disgraced herself and the judgment received criticism from around the world, even from neighbours and friends.

It was the day when the painful truths of our society that had been lingering for months struck home, that beneath the faade of eastern gentleness, peace and harmony, we are brutes with no compassion and unguided by reason.

The skeletons came tumbling out - of massive siphoning of public funds that ought to have made life more comfortable for the common man, of ministerial corruption, even implications of murder and gross abuse of power.

Never before has any society degraded itself so thoroughly in a manufactured sordid scandal of sex and sodomy for all the world to see, and for our children to learn strange new vocabulary, all in a desperate attempt to salvage power that was fast slipping from our hands.

It is the cruellest month for the man who, whatever o­ne may think of him when he was in office, after escaping within an inch of death at the hands of the top law enforcer, must now lead a life in prison like a common criminal in his attempt to regenerate our moral wasteland.

Ah, those children . . . who knows what pain those downcast faces hid? Its hard to believe that four years have lapsed since that day - it all seemed to take place just yesterday.

Outside the courthouse o­n that April morning, the rain stirred dull roots, mixing memory and desire, a memory of old values sacrificed o­n the altar of greed and power, of missed opportunities, a desire for a dignified existence for the common man and for harmony in plurality.

The angry crowd crying out for justice was brutally subdued and dispersed by our law enforcers in an orgy of violence the likes of which this generation has not seen.

April is also the cruellest month for the few who struggled o­n for the cause of justice and regeneration, to be finally incarcerated under that inhumane law that we happily inherited from our colonial masters, and why not anyway, since it had served them so well.

No matter how odious it is and regardless of voices of conscience raised against it over the years, it still is the most effective method for defeating our political opponents.

The people have been lulled and subdued enough, the pursuit of individual wealth and security too over powering for us to be bothered by notions of injustice, oppression and inhumane treatment to which a handful of men and their families are subjected.

Mothers temporarily widowed and children orphaned, struggling to patch together a life that has suddenly been shattered by this inhumane law mattered not to us.

Those April detentions two years ago were indeed very cruel to the men and their families, and there followed the tightening of repressive rules and absurdly creative ways to silence dissent.

For the rest of us, we became paralysed by a sense of fear that devastated our collective soul into a waste land of apathy and submissiveness, our courage, spirit of freedom and love for humanity extinguished.

How sad to see our society slipping into a culture of hypocrisy, sycophancy and mediocrity that cannot be hidden by fantastic proclamations of a prodigious nation-building. No longer do we dare look at injustice in the eye unless it is an injustice committed by others beyond our shores.

These are perfect diversions from the injustice that we have wrought with our own hands. It is much safer, it rocks nobody's boats and it certainly is much more glamorous.

It is now four years after that cruellest month. The man is sick, in pain and in need of medical treatment. Under normal circumstances he is entitled for release o­n bail pending the appeal of his second trial, at least for the medical treatment of his choice. After all he is sick and forgotten, and his calls for reformasi now all but ignored?

Come April 14, we would be forced to look into ourselves again. Have we finally learned our lessons in these four years, to accept and face our own moral wasteland and to start a process of regeneration, to show that compassion is not dead in our hearts and that we can still be guided by reason?

Do we have enough courage to countenance our visage in the mirror? Perhaps not yet. Confronting the truth is too painful, let alone accepting it. We would rather go o­n with our erring ways to our final destruction, bringing down everybody else with us. Didn't they give us that mandate?

Meanwhile the theatre of death and destruction in Iraq is too great an opportunity to be missed. Well then, let's bring o­n the dancing girls while we dig lightly into our pockets for those poor Iraqis. It is always self-reassuring to look at other people's wasteland. Alas, the spring rain was brief.

(From the song Desolation Row by Bob Dylan, 1965)