Imlisanen Jamir
"We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It's as simple as that."
These are lines from a movie that I re-watched recently--1998's 'The Truman Show,' a satirical sci-fi movie that tells the story of Truman Burbank, who is adopted and raised by a corporation inside a simulated television show revolving around his life, until he discovers the truth and decides to escape.
Re-watching it evoked a realization of how the film's layered readings portray an allegory of modern life, even closer home to the Naga existence. It is prophetic of the ubiquity of the Naga reality.
Our own world seems to be witnessing a series of ruptures-- a culture of fear, confusion, obfuscation and paranoia--factors which inhabit the Naga political, social and economic milieu.
In the beginning of The Truman Show, a star falls from the sky; well a light falls from the ceiling of a sky high set that closes an artificial town built for the life of one man and the entertainment of the whole world.
The light is tagged Sirius (9 CANIS MAJOR), which refers to Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which Homer once called the evil vortex bringing heat and fever to suffering humanity.
In the film the falling of Sirius is the first in the series of ruptures in Truman's fake reality, a series that ends here with an actual rupture of breach in faith. Reality, truth and authenticity on the other hand are relegated to a small single rectangle of shadow; hardly the light at the end of the tunnel that we associate with liberation.
Freedom for us, like for Truman is linked with trauma; every peek behind the curtain is accompanied by some form of pain--a pain of memory, the present, or a pain of uncertainty, of not knowing what it it is we are seeing.
We are familiar with it as Nagas; seeing it in our corruption plagued state structure; a depraved economic outlook layered with base utilitarianism and fear; and a chaotic political and social existence bearing the brunt of half a century of uncertainty. In this environment however, we see only what we want to see despite being privy to a lifetime of hints, to a revelation that our world is not as it seems. To incorporate those clues means to reconfigure the entire narrative of our existence; and rewrites like that are just not free. They cost; they cost suffering.
We have been labouring under a system that is finally showing itself to be ridiculous. A society that is trying to wake itself up while stumbling under the pain that surfaces from doing so.
In the movie, The Truman Show's success ultimately hinges on Truman himself. It can only work if he believes in it. The powerful in our world hold things in place like the creators of the show hold Truman, but we hold ourselves in place too.
And like in the film, if nothing else, it's clear that we are slowly waking up into a new political reality.
Like in Truman's world, the power relationships of our own have gained in consolidated strength by convincing us that they are normal. By taking any breach and folding it back into the narrative, they've kept all those like Truman and us, considered to be perennial losers, at bay.
But ideologies don't last forever, eventually they crumble under their own weight and the increasing refusal of people to believe in them.
Ultimately, like in the film, we need to realise what waking up looks like and how the messaging of the dominant ideology is absorbed into media and education. We need to realise how individual people, even people we trust, good people can become the mouthpieces for a rotten system.
And most important of all, we need to imagine liberation not as utopia but as a world flawed like our own, full of multiplicity and contradiction.
It's a world gained only by pain and struggle; not a sun burst in the clouds or an endless sea, but a small shadowy door that leads off to a territory unmapped, but hopefully invested with a greater authenticity.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
