S Akbar Zaidi’s recent article in these pages (November 8, 2013) on my film, ‘Wounds of Waziristan’, is replete with ad hominem attacks. He misrepresents what he does know, makes up what he doesn’t know and uses slanders as placeholders for an argument that is missing. Nearly every sentence of his piece needs correction, but let me focus broadly on two issues: one about me and the other about my work.

Dr Zaidi queries whether I am “sympathetic to the Taliban”, terms me a “cyber-activist” who belongs to a “handful of privileged, supposedly leftist students from Pakistan” that are “sitting in the bosom of the west”. Normally, I would not respond. But these smears are part of a longstanding general campaign to deride the work of Pakistanis with whom Dr Zaidi and his allies disagree and to de-legitimate our standing to speak. So, let’s talk about privilege – mine and Dr Zaidi’s.

As I stated directly in ‘Wounds’, my family was forced out of Pakistan by the same forces that ravage the country today. Thanks to my parents, I survived a rundown urban education in a hard-scrabble neighbourhood; scholarships put me through high school, college and graduate school. I am now a graduate student at Columbia University in New York – where Dr Zaidi has a professorship. So, I am somewhat bemused that someone who began at Karachi Grammar School, and who now holds the Pakistani state appointed Quaid-e-Azam chair at a prestigious university, is attacking me for my privilege and suggesting that it is he who is the gritty realist and bearer of hard truths.

I wonder whether he’s aware of the sublime irony of pounding away on his keyboard against disconnected leftists ‘in the bosom of the west’ while sitting in the bosom of his Columbia University office, afforded the privileges of his position. I wonder whether he thinks he has escaped the kind of intellectual bankruptcy it takes to defame someone as a Taliban apologist simply because he put a question mark at the end of his rhetorical statement. Does he think that punctuation allows him to evade responsibility for his wild accusations? And if so, can I ask whether Dr Zaidi is comfortable offering up marginalised Pakistanis as fodder for drone attacks?

The fact is, neither I, nor he, deal directly with the violence of the military or the militants or the drones on a daily basis. That unfortunate privilege belongs to marginalised Pakistanis, particularly the people of Fata and Balochistan. ‘Wounds” is an effort to give voice to a small segment of these Pakistanis, and to take their lives seriously. It is not a documentary about drones. It is a film about drone survivors and the families of the dead.

The springboard for the narrative is a speech by President Obama delivered this year in which he claims to be haunted by the loss of civilian life resulting from his policies. We make the frame clear by beginning with this speech followed by a guiding question: “What does it mean to be haunted by loss?” It should be clear that to answer that question by saying “Because, Taliban” is utterly nonsensical.

‘Wounds’ is also not “cyber-activism”, as Dr Zaidi ludicrously alleges. How does he imagine the film was shot? Does he think that the research and filming was conducted via Google? Let me clarify: it was not. I conducted dozens of interviews on-the-record and off-the-record inside and outside of Fata. I have spent years around this issue, though I don’t doubt there is more to learn. More broadly, as a journalist who was based in Karachi, I have travelled and interviewed widely within Pakistan from South Punjab to Swat to Balochistan, where some of the people I knew are dead, and others are on the run.

To call it ‘cyber-activism’ not only denigrates my work in a patriarchal manner but also the sacrifices that many others made in order to speak to me, and whose direct voices I captured in my documentary.

My film’s online premiere and its subsequent broadcast on television in the US is the first time that Americans have seen an extended report focused on the stories of survivors and kin of those killed by American bombs in Pakistan. The film has not been screened in Pakistan, though a Pakistani television channel may have broadcast it without rights; its primary audience is Americans. For the last nine years since the bombing began, the lived experiences of people directly affected by drone attacks have been largely invisible. Political parties fulminate over the attacks, analysts discuss their legal or political implications, but very little discussion engages with the lives of the people who actually endure them.

Last fall, the first report ever to document the stories of affectees was published jointly by the law schools at Stanford University and New York University. Amnesty International followed up with its report released this October. The media backdrop in the US for these reports, as well as my film, is a constant hum of stories in which the spectre of terrorism on American soil justifies everything from America’s foreign wars to its widespread domestic surveillance.

Scores of videos and documentaries on the Taliban have been released in the US, including those by Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy. Malala Yousafzai’s incalculable courage has made Americans yet more aware of the ruthlessness of the Taliban: Malala’s book currently sits at #22 on Amazon’s bestseller list.

While Malala has commanded the attention of President Obama – to whom she was not shy about voicing her opposition to drone attacks – nine-year-old Nabila, who travelled to the US this month to deliver testimony to Congress about the bombing that killed her grandmother and injured the little girl, was received by a paltry five members out of the 435 US House of Representatives. There has been a studious disinterestedness in the stories of drone survivors. They don’t sell. That’s the broader context for ‘Wounds’.

Our task then was to produce a film that would foreground the stories of survivors and families without disaggregating them from the various forms of violence to which Waziristan is subject but also, crucially, without falling into the binary of drones or the Taliban. When we began testing earlier versions of the film, we quickly realised that Americans are acutely aware of the Taliban and terrorism as a general political meme, but are ignorant of the history that forms the present.

Dr Zaidi would have us think that ‘Wounds’ does not discuss the Taliban when, in fact, there are entire sequences depicting the use of Fata as a training ground for the production of militancy not to mention narration that links the violence of state and non-state actors: the Pakistan security establishment, the US and the insurgents – variously known and situated through history as the mujahideen, ‘freedom fighters’, the Taliban.

The entire documentary elucidates a portion of the world made possible only through the existence of this nexus. So, when Dr Zaidi says we don’t discuss the Taliban, what he really means is he went looking for one film and when he found another, he couldn’t compute.

In the context of that network of violence, ‘Wounds’ reflects on loss and endurance among survivors because that is what they live with. Its primary obligation, as the masterful documentarian Fredrick Wiseman has said, is to be fair to the voices represented. And the responsibility of the critic is to engage intelligently with a film and the world it brings to light. Dr Zaidi has been unequal to the task, so it is up to the audience to watch the film and judge for themselves.

The writer is an independent journalist and graduate student at Columbia University. She is one of the founding editors of Tanqeed.org.

Twitter: @Madi_Hatter

http://e.thenews.com.pk/11-14-2013/page6.asp