Cross Talk
Meet the Marginal Man
THERE is a man inside every man. The Rain Man lives inside an autistic person who is either mentally or socially impaired, or both. The Renaissance Man, or Homo Universalis, is someone who is a polymath, whose reach of knowledge goes to more than one topic. Then Francis Fukuyama introduces the Last Man, who is the product of capitalist liberal democracy, his needs for wealth and recognition satisfied in the final stage of social synthesis. Which man lives inside a man in this country? One that fits the bill is the Marginal Man, a wedge-like entity caught in his own contradictions.
Throughout history there have been other kinds of men. Feudal Man, Capitalist Man, even First Man, each man for a particular stage of social progression, shaped by a set of human values suited to it. But the Marginal Man is quite a phenomenon; first identified by Robert E. Park in 1937. This man is one, whom fate has condemned to live in two antagonistic cultures, "whose mind is the crucible in which two different cultures may be said to melt, and, either wholly or in part, fuse."
For example war criminals participating in our national election is one contradiction. When a deposed autocrat turns into the guardian angel of democracy, that's another. We have mourned for Nur Hussain and we have mourned for Dr. Milon, but in the same breath we have also chanted slogans for their killer in this election season. The last two years have been one helluva stint of contradiction. All that time we waited for the reformers to reform politics, the reformers were reforming themselves.
The Marginal Man is an oxymoron. We are the only nation on earth whose national struggle started with its love of mother tongue. Yet more English language schools have opened in this country since 1971 than ever before. Our urban dialect is becoming increasingly spiked with foreign words from the English, Hindi and Arabic languages.
More contradictions, the most glaring of them is the plight of freedom fighters in this country. We call them the greatest sons of the soil. And we never worried why they lived and died unsung, even pulled rickshaws or begged for a living while this nation owed its freedom to their blood.
A recent campaign for HIV/AIDS has exposed a fresh contradiction. The man has been made so big on the billboard that the message almost fell off the frame. One billboard looks crowded with spines of books stacked in a bookshelf. It projects the man's credentials all right, but makes it difficult to figure out the campaign.
In fact, this is one unmistakable symptom of the Marginal Man. He is magnified to embellish the message. In the end one contradicts another while both are undermined in the process.
The National Board of Revenue has recently disclosed that 46% of car owners reported fake Tax Identification Number. The Marginal Man does this kind of things. He enjoys life but hates its responsibilities. He is an opportunist, a hypocrite, who wants the best of both worlds because neither world is adequate for him.
Now you see what I mean. The Marginal Man contradicts himself margin by margin. He says one thing, but does something else; he loathes practicing what he loves to preach. He shines in the margin, dimmed in essence, never too serious, forever mysterious, staying off the center, grazing on the periphery, enamoured with style, averse to substance.
The Marginal Man marginalises everything. He turns into a ceremonial man, his emotions confined to specific dates or events. He is a language martyr in February, a booklover as well. In March he is a freedom fighter, a nostalgic liberator in December. In Boishakh he is a Bengali, a Bangladeshi rest of the year. More than often, he loses his sight of the forest for the trees.
The problem is that he can only sustain his emotions stint by stint. He lives his life in piecemeal, never the whole man, chopped and sliced on the cutting edge of conflicts. What Napoleon said about the Bourbons is true for him. He learns nothing and forgets nothing. He commits mistakes, which he is condemned to repeat.
If we wonder what is wrong with us and why we are still stewing in our own juice thirty-seven years after independence, the Marginal Man has the answer to it. Man marginalised himself, which marginalised government, which marginalised the country. It has been one unbroken vicious cycle of living from edge to edge.
Lined up in sequence, these edges are three original sins: corruption, coup and conspiracy. In three days time, the Marginal Man awaits yet one more margin call from destiny. If he adds more contradictions, he will get more conflicts. If he resolves a few, lucky him will turn from the edge of an abyss.
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