ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 continues the reflection on the ethics of representation with Ela Sen's short story collection, Darkening Days (1944), which contains drawings by Zainul Abedin. Sen and Abedin are both critical of the tendency in representations of the famine of turning subjects into spectacles. Sen traces this tendency to a collapse of community and the rise of self-interest. She writes of the role of women in fostering a kind of community that is not dependent on biological family relationships, caste, and class but rather structured by empathy and compassion, which does not require full knowledge of fellow subjects. Edouard Glissant's concept of opacity as a right is helpful in interpreting the images. Abedin's sketches emphasize an unbridgeable expanse between the subject and the bourgeois observer and a respect for the subject's privacy in her moment of extreme vulnerability. For both Sen and Abedin, fostering human connections does not require transparent access to the destitute subject.
