Ironeaters

My grandparents lived through many bell-curved years. When I was a child, they shared stories about how the monsoon season would be a time of absolute jubilee, because their crops could finally grow. Yet, it also posed the risk that their harvest would be swept away. After the monsoon ended, they would wait patiently for the next one, and the parabola continued over years and years, like a sine wave. This, I learned many years later, characterized a way of life that exists all across Bangladesh. 

That pattern of perpetual growth and decay, I think, forms a key part of what it means to be Bangali. In fact, a lot of Bangla poetry explores that feeling of both joy and fear toward the river's flood. Rabindranath Tagore's "The Golden Boat", for instance, starts with the following stanza:

Clouds rumbling in the sky; teeming rain.
I sit on the river bank, sad and alone.
The sheaves lie gathered, harvest has ended,
The river is swollen and fierce in its flow.
As we cut the paddy it started to rain. 

There's a very specific cultural psychology embedded in these lines. It's about learning to endure loss and destruction, over and over again. That our endeavors, however much we pour ourselves into them, are guaranteed to be erased at least at some point in time, and somehow, accepting that. To be clear, I don't want to suggest that this structures the psychological makeup of every single Bangladeshi -- that would be logical malpractice. I'd just like to bring to light that, under the assumption that poetry to some extent may reflect a few of the key, resonant emotions that exist in a nation, Tagore's poem may hit a central note that could characterize how many Bangladeshis have viewed the monsoon, the river, and the rain, accross generations: as a force that has taught us to be okay with loss and learning from endurance.
---
I think this documentary about ripping boats apart might partially fill the void of what I didn't fully hear from my grandparents when they said, "Then, we wait for the next monsoon." This isn't to say that I think my grandparents were doing this in the off-months. My grandfather was a diplomat for the Bangladeshi government (and that carried its own set of problems), but he did own a farm. It does make me wonder, though, how he might have spent the off-months, and how people across Bangladesh endure the non-monsoon seasons. This documentary gives some insight into that.

In Chittagong, males of all ages, old and young alike, voyage in the non-monsoon months to the sea, tear apart old boats from the West, and sell the iron at a profit. How it works is that a company pays several hundred thousand dollars for an old boat. Then, they bus in hundreds of laborers, most of whom seem to be farmers, into the worksite. They then rip the boat to shreds and earn the equivalent of three dollars a day. 

The documentary has no subtitles, barely any narration, and focuses mainly on recording the everyday labor these men perform. To the Western eye, it might be easy to quickly slip into the habit of thinking that this is "trauma porn" or "poverty porn". In a sense, it certainly could be, and it is produced for distribution to a German audience, after all. Yet I think the film's discomfort is part of the point. The unease felt might, rather, say a lot about how the Western viewer is far too distanced from the forms of labor depicted here. 

Alas, there's been a paradox about picturing poverty since the days of Jacob Riis, and this film might not fully escape it. Nevertheless, I think it's an incredibly strong depiction of how labor exploitation shifts and mutates over time, and how the remnants and waste produced by the West just become another monsoon for these men as something they didn't choose but are forced to grapple with anyway.