Daily Times

When Will Smith announced the winner of the Oscar award for the best picture of the year on March 2, 2014, it was not at all a big surprise. No doubt, 12 Years A Slave had been a favourite but the question is if the real life events in the life of Solomon Northup, as shown in the movie, had moved enough US citizens to ponder further on the racial discrepancy between whites and black and, if through his story, the movie brought the issue of discrimination back into the national discourse. The competition was indeed tough. There was Alonso Curaon’s Gravity, a movie depicting the life of astronauts in space with its unique gravity-less 3D experience and then there was Martin Scorsese’s Wolf Of Wall Street, a true story based on the life of Wall Street broker Jordan Belfort. Compared to both of them, 12 Years A Slave was an underdog that was much less glamorous and even less discussed during the academy award season.

The movie tells us about Solomon Northup, a violinist, a farmer and a free black man in 19th century New York who leads a peaceful middle-class life with his family. One day, he is approached by two white men in his hometown regarding an opportunity to play the violin professionally and get paid a handsome amount in Washington DC for a few days. Without thinking it through and heedlessly ignoring details, he decides to travel with them to the capital to return in just a few days. Out of excitement, he does not inform his family about his journey either, a mistake that he will regret for a long time. After their arrival in the big city, his partners take him to a restaurant for dinner where he drinks a few glasses of alcohol, ignoring the fact that he is the only black customer in the hall. Moments later, under the influence of drugs, he loses consciousness never to wake up as a free man for years to come.

He opens his eyes hours later, in the dark empty room of a sailing ship, his hands cuffed, his ankles chained, his body stripped of almost all his clothes. He realises, at once, that he has been abducted and the people who approached him in New York have deceived him, a game that they planned and played very well while he, out of his ignorance, just kept digging his own grave deeper and deeper. The ship heads south towards New Orleans where he is sold in the market as a slave. In the beginning, he tries to convince his white masters that he is a free black man but to no avail. For the next 12 years, deep in the plantations, Solomon Northup is treated like an animal, his body tortured, his back scarred by lashes, his neck bruised by hanging, his hands roughened by field work, his eyes filled with pain and tears, his ego tormented and his soul humiliated.

12 Years A Slave is produced by Brad Pitt and depicts the brutal and inhumane treatment by Caucasians of their blacks slaves in the states where slavery was legal. For two hours or more in the movie, one gruesome event is followed by another cruel incident. The viewer has no choice except to sympathise with Mr Northup and all the other blacks who are tortured, raped and abused, all the while feeling repulsed by the barbaric behaviour of the whites.

With tears in your eyes after watching the movie, you may ask why the US and its people should show these atrocities and publicise their own wrongdoings to the world. Or would they have been better off had its white population tried to hide its mistakes and push them under the rug? Should Brad Pitt be tried under the treason law for bringing such a sensitive topic of race into the limelight or be encouraged and awarded with trophies, academy awards and medals for being truthful?

If he were living in Pakistan, the answer is simple: there is no way he would have been allowed to make a movie on such a controversial issue where our role as a nation can be implicated as being irresponsible. We would hurl abuses at him if such a project were ever initiated. We would call all the producers traitors, accuse them of being people who always speak about negativity and refuse to see the positive side. One of our politicians would have boycotted the movie by saying that only an enemy agent can defame one’s own country like that. He would have alleged that the producers of the movie were working on an agenda and would have pushed the federal government to set up a commission to investigate. The politician would have taken the case to the Supreme Court (SC) in a petition to charge the director and producer with treason. No matter how tolerant we might claim to be, such a movie would have been trashed by a segment of society, people who identify themselves as hyper-nationalists and are committed to blaming others for their own mistakes.

On the other hand, for many, the movie sends a strong message to all its viewers: a message to admit one’s own faults, a commitment to learn from those mistakes, a resolve to undo the past, if possible, and to make a better future. Learning from Brad Pitt and his colleagues, we can tell the true and honest story of Bangladesh who may think of themselves as being enslaved for 24 years by West Pakistanis. We can admit that we have made mistakes. We cannot afford to deny them or attempt to trivialise our wrongdoings any longer, can we? We have to tell them that we understand how hurt they feel, that their pain is felt on our side as well and that we want to move forward by holding each other’s hands as friends, without holding grudges against each other.

The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com