You Will Roam Like A Madwoman [2017]
You Will Roam Like a Madwoman takes as a starting point a single issue of a popular Bangladeshi magazine of the 1970s. This is the special issue that came out during the 1977 hijack of Japan Airlines to Dhaka. A coolly aloof press note, taking up only a quarter of a column, announces that eleven air force soldiers were killed by “individuals lacking patriotism.” The artificial restraint of that note reminds us of the lead hijacker, who says (in Mohaiemen’s film United Red Army) about the same moment, “I understand you have some internal problems.”
Meanwhile, the“Personals” section of the magazine includes matrimonial ads, used cars for sale, and one particularly violent jilted Romeo, who curses his former lover to forever roam the earth “like a madwoman.” As with many of his projects, Mohaiemen builds annotated archives, complete with footnotes, from unlikely objects – here a magazine whose big achievement in the 1970s was to bring the sexual revolution to sleepy Bangladesh.
Magazine courtesy of Syed Arif Yousuf collection.