Rana Plaza collapsed on 24 April 2013. The day before, Bangladeshi authorities had asked the owners to evacuate the eight-storey building, which housed, among other establishments such as a bank and shops, factories that employed around 3000 workers. Rana Plaza, located in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, produced garments for the commodity chain that stretches from the cotton fields of Southasia through Bangladesh's machines and workers to the retail houses in the Atlantic world. Garments for famous brands were stitched here, as are clothes that hang on the shelves of Wal-Mart. Over 1100 workers died under the building. They did not stand a chance.
Following the devastation, photographer and activist Taslima Akhter took her camera to Rana Plaza. She photographed what she saw as an act of remembrance. One of her pictures became emblematic of the violence – a man embraces a woman, both dead, covered by dust and debris. It was the tenderness in the midst of such brutality that made the picture so iconic. Akhter is part of the Biplobi Nari Sanghati and the Gana Sanghati Andolan – one a women's organisation and the other a group involved in left-wing activism. These are the contours of Akhter's politics and it helped define her powerful photographs. Akhter also teaches at Pathshala, a photography school in Dhaka founded by Shahidul Alam. When the dust began to settle on Rana Plaza, Pathshala's team, including Akhter, began to document the lives of the dead and the missing. Their work became Chobbish April: Hazaar Praner Chitkar (24th April: outcries of a thousand souls).
The book – nearly 500 pages long – is a pastiche of the tragedy. There are pages that collect the posters put up by frantic family members in search of their loved ones; there are passport photographs of the dead with a brief sense of their lives; there are pictures of the rescue operations and pictures of protests (Disclaimer: I have an essay in the volume). The book opens with the story of 35-year-old Baby Akhter, a swing operator in EtherTex Garment, who began work at Rana Plaza only 16 days before her death. Akhter came to Dhaka from Rangpur, where her father was a landless peasant. She came here seeking a better life for her children. Akhter's only luxury was paan and a hand-held fan, said her husband Delowar. "She was ready to stand with me and fight any battle," he recalled. Her picture exudes defiance and shows her kindness – a smile hidden in her face. Chobbish April's feat is to bring alive the worlds of the workers, and to reveal the political cruelty of Bangladesh's role in the garment trade. This is not merely a book of sorrow. It is also a book containing a loud scream.
Jeremy Seabrook's The Song of the Shirt: Cheap Clothes Across Continents and Centuries is driven by the same kinds of concerns as that of Chobbish April. Both books detail the social history of the factory worker – most likely a woman (80 percent) who has migrated away from conditions of landlessness and flood to the factories, and is most likely fully aware of the provisional status of her employment. They are "disposable, rags of humanity," writes Seabrook. The workers bring with them the desolation of the countryside ravaged by industrial agriculture – overworked soil and poisoned watercourses as well as a law of value that makes the small farmer redundant before the might of capitalist farms. In the city of Barisal, Seabrook spots the migrants leaving the place to find work. Among them are young women who are: