Fascinated by the Divide...

Connect the Dots # 3 

 

Tonight, Connect the Dots look at the some of the gaps/fissures that exist in our world. It is not the solution or the remedy that is discussed, but the division/dichotomy itself. How deep-rooted it is and how it manifests itself in the society. Just as we study the human capacity to love it is amazing to look at how people can draw a line of hate in their minds. t is interesting to look at how the human mind has the power to stay divided inspite of the ‘texts’ that exhorts and preaches love and tolerance. 

The first story is adapted from The International New York Times about the old Yugoslavia which from a unified chunk became a fragmented realm. (Refer to the timeline of disintegration in the map above). Mostar,the Bosnian city has  two fire stations,two garbage collection companies, two hospitals, two electricity companies, two bus stations, two popular nightclubs and two soccer teams. If there is a fire alarm ringing in Mostar, Sabit Golos, a veteran firefighter, knows that he does not have to worry unless the flames burn something on the Muslim side. Of the two Fire brigades, one is made up mostly of Muslims like Mr. Golos, who are responsible for putting out fires on the east side of the old front line and a second one staffed by Catholic Croats that douses flames on the other side. The line vanished long ago but it lives on in the mind, an emblem of the ethnonationality fissures that exist in the country. Muslim children attend high school in the same building as Catholic Croat students but never mixed with them because students went to classes in shifts - Muslims from 7:30 a.m. and Croats from 2 p.m., a common arrangement. The school toilet is the only place where students from different ethnicities come together. “Interaction between people of different ethnicities has been banished to the smelly toilets," says Professor Azra Hromadzic the author of the book ‘Citizens of an empty nation - Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina’. Azra Hromadzic teaches anthropology at Syracuse University. 

The second dot is about a literary fissure which existed between two literary giants. Their story of animosity is the content of the book 'The Feud by Alex Beam. The review of the same appeared in WSJ (December 17 - 18, 2016). Russian author Pushkin is the reason behind the enmity between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. The review begins with a lovely quote by Samuel Johnson, ‘Very slender differences will sometimes part those whom long reciprocation of civility or beneficence has united.’ which kind of sums up the adage - What unites, divides. Both Wilson and Nabokov became friends because of the common passion that they shared – Russian Literature. The warmth of their relationship is embedded in these lines “the two were working on translating a “little tragedy” by Pushkin, the 1830 play “Mozart and Salieri.” “It is quite perfect now,” Nabokov wrote to Wilson in 1941, after the New Republic had published their translation. “You have played your Mozart to my Salieri.”Pushkin’s play is based on the real-life bonding between the Austrian composer Mozart and the Italian composer Salieri. Pushkin again was the reason behind the rift between these two authors. Edmund Wilson publicly criticized the translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by Nabokov. He wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1965, describing Nabokov’s language as “uneven,” “banal” and recondite. From a stage in their relationship where they both used to call each other Bunny and Volodya, they moved to a stage where they called each other ‘repellent’ and ‘philistine’. The book review begins by making a reference to other fights in the literary arena - ‘Verlaine shot Rimbaud. Tolstoy challenged Turgenev to a duel. Hemingway considered Fitzgerald a whiner, and Coleridge belittled Wordsworth as “no poet.” But no literary feud has been quite as literary, or as graceless, as the one that erupted in 1965 between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov. 

The third dot is a visual representation from the torn social fabric of America. 

Source: https://allthatsinteresting.com/segregation-in-america

Hate does not require any effort on our part because it is a part of the human existence.                        ( https://www.taosnews.com/stories/my-turn-why-is-hate-easier-than-love)  - Is this statement true?