Still on Dhaka

“And I just want the colors. Colors don't cry
They are like an awakening.
...
Every new morning,
I'll go out on the street looking for colors"
(Cesare Pavese, from “Agony”)

Dhaka, February 2020

Dhaka breaks my heart.

It's not too different, in some ways, from Jakarta.

They are those infinite cities where life teems, and quivers, in the busy streets as well as the most hidden ones – indeed, their reality has a different flavor.

Provided you dive inside without any perception of fear because distrust makes the smile artificial, a smirk more than a greeting.

In Jakarta my friends took me where no one would want to go even by mistake, I also went below the level of the asphalt, where people live like rats in total darkness, together with rats.

But never, for a second, did I fear that something bad might happen to me.

In Jakarta, the streets between the houses in the suburbs get so narrow that sometimes you are afraid of getting stuck in the middle.

Scratching the rough surface of the wall as you walk is the city's way of reminding you where you are and that you have to show respect.

 

Kolong Tol Jelembar. Jakarta, 11 July 2016

In Dhaka, the little streets are wider, darker, and made of earth rather than asphalt, but what I never forget is the color.

If in Rome, in my Torpignattara, I breathe color standing motionless looking at Bangladeshi women with their dresses, in Dhaka I was overwhelmed by the splashes of color that surrounded me.

As I also wrote in my book-story of that trip: color is the daily battle against the misery and the greyness of this difficult city.

It is the hope that people wear, the resistance that becomes a dress.

So the nostalgia for that city is not only for its faces, stories, and friendships but above all for its color. This has never happened to me before.

 

Dhaka, February 2020

I still believe that it's just my thought, that those women who, every morning, have the power to wrap their body and head with infinite nuances don't realize it.

Dust, smog, and earth will never be able to win over those colors.

This is demonstrated by the smiling faces in the challenges that are repeated the same every day, in those who are not lucky enough to live in bright white skyscrapers.

But this is the same in Jakarta as it is in Manila.

A lesson that each of us should learn by traveling to these places at least once in our life.

 

Dhaka, February 2020

And then there are visions that chain our eyes and emotions to that moment, a sort of punctum of the soul, using a photographic term used by Ronald Barthes to define that odd, unusual or emotionally loaded detail in a photograph that makes that unforgettable image for us.

I can't help but get excited every time I think back and see the photograph of that little boy playing with the kite in Sutrapur, Old Dhaka.

I happened upon it by chance going towards the Shyam Bazar, entering the courtyard of this ruined building which I later discovered was a hostel where university students sleep.

Right at the entrance was this little boy playing quietly, completely ignoring me, with the dirt and dilapidated structure in the background. As I wrote in my book it seemed to be the perfect visual metaphor for bakarkhani, the typical sweet found only in Old Dhaka, rough and crunchy on the outside but sweet and fragrant when you bite into it.

 

Dhaka, February 2020

It reminded me of the children I met in 2014 in Jakarta, in the Petamburan slum: a photograph that became iconic, to the point that years later a television program asked me to return to the same place to tell how that image was born.

Who then told the same about the boys with the kite, only that they had trained pigeons. Children who, among piles of rubbish, looked across the river at the skyscrapers and played with the pigeons to make them fly and come back. Because if you were born in those places, it's difficult to truly take off.

Just like that child, intent on trying to fly that heavy kite but with little space to run.

 

Petamburan. Jakarta, July 2014

Children are like colors: they vibrate with hope.

For me, colors have always been the stylistic hallmark of my photography.

They are brushstrokes that let the heart speak of its thorns and petals.

I'm hungry for colors, that's why Dhaka entered my skin and eyes like a pin.

The same reason why Torpignattara is the place where I go to silence my anxieties.

It's the painful and perfect plot of the furious battle between melancholy and joy, between tears and smiles, between barren land and salwar kamiz.

 

As Baul Poet Kala Shah writes in “Doyal”:
    “O kind hearted
    you have turned wrought iron into pure gold.”

Dhaka, February 2020

It is not easy to see, but if you close your eyes, draw a long sigh, isolate the deafening sounds of horns, voices, engines, and open your eyes again you will see hundreds of small rivers of color infecting the heavy and helpless mass of the earth.

You will see color, not only as an aesthetic element, an accessory to wear, but as survival, hope, love.

No longer just the classic struggle between dark and light: here light becomes a prism that radiates infinite shades and hues.

If you manage to see it for the first time, it will never leave you and you cannot help but love these people.

This city.

Bangladesh.

“In the morning I cast my net into the sea.

From the dark abyss I drew strange things

appearance and of strange beauty -

some shone like a smile,

some glistened like tears,

and some were red

like the cheeks of a bride.”

(Rabrindanath Tagore, III, “The Gardener”)

Dhaka, February 2020

Italian version