Arts & Letters Vol 2 Issue 6

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ARTS & LETTERS

Shorelines

Expatriates

Adil Jussawalla

Alev Adil

Editor Zafar Sobhan Acting Editor Arts & Letters Iffat Nawaz Artist Shazzad H Khan

Last night I dreamt I kissed you in a way that I’m not allowed to.

You disappeared: not by magic but by geometry, through the silver brown bones of an olive tree.

Your outstretched hand held an orange carelessly dropped it in my lap.

Let the sun set into Girne’s bloody sea.

Your eyes further darkened lost in a landscape of nostalgia.

If not my birthplace then my memory is an occupied country.

I have no home but now.

There must be no looking back.

Last night I dreamt we kissed.

The salty taste said, “Eurydice, the Mediterranean could take you, throw you to the other shore the carcass of a cuttlefish.”

Don’t look back.

Waking exiles us all over again. n Alev Adil is a lecturer at the University of Greenwich and the author of Venus Infers.

A new moon rising in rain, A shore buttressed with shanties.

There’s a woman in a doorway She says, “We’re all castaways here” And takes me in.

Another sea, a calmer woman.

The horizon was decked out with sails.

The poem I wrote her satisfied two, their looks opening into each other like rooms that share a door.

I couldn’t stay and bolted.

I won’t describe every shoreline that’s pulled me up short, waiting for passage. They’re all one now, The edge of Blackwater, the sea we crossed at our peril.

Is everyone here? The Earth is flat and not everyone’s accounted for.

Here’s a picture in case you missed it: It’s stark, its doorways and windows vanished.

Its winds have nothing to rattle, so they howl.

It repeats itself wherever you stay.

It repeats itself no matter what.

Its waves go on and on too, like a radio’s bad reception: a pause, and a long hiss.

At night the sea’s barely visible.

Beyond it other shorelines.

Beyond them fjords and galaxies. n Adil Jussawalla is a poet and critic. He has written two books of poetry, Land’s End and Missing Person.

Ode to lyrical voice of senses Iffat Nawaz

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he is gone. End of May, Maya Angelou left the world. The remarkably poetic American literary voice — novelist, actress, professor, singer, dancer and activist — Maya Angelou lived a life of 86 years and left the world from her home in North Carolina.

Maya’s memoir, I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, caught the world’s eye in 1969. But with a life like Maya’s — raped by her mother’s boyfriend at the age of 7, then spending the next five years of her life speechless and eventually having a child on the street as a teenager — she had been showing the gravity of her strength years before the world recognised the aptitude of her talents. Maya’s writing talked about racism, poverty, injustice, pain, and then conquering all which infects the inside. She voiced the struggles from yet unexplored places in America. But she didn’t just speak as an African American female, she spoke as a woman, she wrote as a human.

A thousand obituaries must have been written about Maya already. She deserves more, way more. Why do we as Bangladeshi readers, women and men, relate to Maya. How has she moved us? Was it the universal truths she wrote about? The repeated evils of each continent? Exposing a part of the secret crimes which runs through many suppressed communities around the world? Is that what made her special to us?

Or was it her voice as a strong woman, who took pride in the clicks of her heels, the bend of her hair, the palm of her hand, and the need for her care that made those who read her want to be as confident, as direct, as inspirational. Did some of us use her poems almost like the words of prayers, to heal our own souls; did we read her out to crowds to pass on the messages, knowing there is a need for it, the hunger for positive inspirations, letting us know we are not alone, in our small and big struggles.

Maya meant many things to many people. She might have been the light at the end of the tunnel for those who had similar lives. But to understand and love Maya, one did not need to have their own struggles, anyone with empathy for the living could relate to her. We can translate Maya in our minds, in our own ways, maybe different from each other but the collective muttered and unmuttered gratitude we will send towards Maya for many years to come, that is what defines her. And what a beautiful way Maya has found to live forever — phenomenally — again and again. n

ARTS & LETTERS

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Dhondy in Dhaka Subi Shah

The first Bengal Lights Literary Conclave at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) played host this month to a galaxy of stars from the literary world, amongst them Farrukh Dhondy, the novelist, screenwriter and British television executive. In an exclusive interview with Arts & Letters, Dhondy tells all about his adventures in the capital city.

“I

love this city! It’s so vibrant, so full of possibilities!” says Farrukh Dhondy almost as soon as we sit down to begin our interview. He is full of infectious good humour and excitement despite the extreme heat and hectic nature of the day. I ask how he is coping with the jet lag “Jet lag?

No such thing for the travelling mind! It’s only for people who can’t play in the time dimension.”

Earlier that day, Dhondy had read a selection of poems from his best selling book of verse, Rumi: A New Translation, as part of the opening ceremony for the Bengal Lights Literary Conclave. The audience seemed to be quite familiar with the basic messages in Rumi’s philosophical love poetry — but during the reading, Dhondy explained that he, unlike other writers on Rumi, set about to not only translate the ideas, but the verse itself, into English language poetry, employing Rumi’s device of iambic pentameter.

In a later panel session, Dhondy had discussed some of his favourite writers — amongst them, Rudyard Kipling. Something of a surprise perhaps from the left wing activist and former Black Panther core committee member. When challenged about this, Dhondy says, “The nationalism of post-colonial societies has set readers against Kipling. I think we are past all that and can look beyond narrow nationalisms to value the work of a great writer, even his acute observation of India and Indians. Reading him might even teach us how to chart the nuances of our corrupt societies. I came to this conclave under the impression that the audience and the people I shared platforms with would be stimulated into disagreements and debates if I mentioned or praised Rudyard Kipling and VS Naipaul. Kipling is seen in the UK to be racist and especially anti-Bengali and Naipaul I thought was widely hated for his books and observations. But I was wrong! However provocative my remarks, my fellow panellists and the audience seemed either to agree or to be merely amused — they had gone beyond instigation! I felt like a sumo wrestler with no challengers willing to enter the ring!”

This robust response provokes me to ask him to what extent South Asian writers should, or indeed must, take political correctness into account in their poetry or prose.

“Political correctness is in the eye of the beholder. I went to a literary conference once where a South Asian novelist read a chapter of his book, in which a woman in a railway compartment is raped by a tramp and begins to like it. The writer definitely thought he was being descriptive and bold but the westerners in the audience, including myself, thought it was disgusting and unbelievable. There were some in the audience who clearly thought that this is the kind of lurid nonsense that wins literary prizes. Telling the truth about societies is the job of a writer and I certainly will not consciously pull my punches. Not using impolite words is part of my upbringing, not part of my political correctness.”

Dhondy has written a vast range of novels, biographies, television screenplays and feature films, including the Whitbread Prize nominated novel Bombay Duck, the Samuel Becket Award winning BBC television series Come To Mecca and the multi award winning Shekhar Kapur movie The Bandit Queen. When asked about what inspires him to write and how he sources his material, he shakes his head and laughingly tells me I have asked him the wrong question — that the writing finds the

writer and not the other way around. “Write about what I know. The best advice I can pass on to any aspiring writers is to take no advice and to discover for yourself what your own writing is for, who it’s for and what it’s about. While saying that, I remember that EM Forster said ‘Yes - oh dear - yes — the novel tells a story.’”

As the screenwriter and commissioner for popular British programmes such as No Problem and Desmond’s, Dhondy has often been cited as one of the only writers who manages to capture authentic language, experience, and accent. Perhaps this is due to the fact that, after coming to London in the 1970s, he worked variously as a taxi driver, a dog walker, a painter and decorator, a nude model for art classes and an onion delivery-truck driver to various Bangladeshi restaurants which were just starting to spring up in London’s East End. It was while doing these jobs, says Dhondy, that he developed ears and eyes for the authentic immigrant experience. Dhondy says, “To write about Bangladeshi immigrants in the UK and to understand their language and their experiences, you do not need to do a writers’ course, you need to have lived with them, interacted with them — the nuances of their speech ought to be part of your consciousness. Writing about the misery of a downtrodden young Bangladeshi woman may attract publishers and liberal British readers but it’s not the whole truth. Coming to Dhaka, I hear from readers and critics alike that there is a staggering inauthenticity about books written by certain immigrant writers for the British publishing industry.”

When asked about stories which have not yet been told that he would like to explore, Dhondy tells me that he has not read any fiction that tackles with familiarity the massive contemporary narratives of South Asia. He says that a big issue in Bangladesh lies in the tension between being Bengali and being Muslim as defined by powers in the Islamic world. In India, he says, the narrative takes the form of dangerous and desperate disparity. It’s the emergence of development from the degradation of millions. In Pakistan, it’s twenty contradictions that can’t support the idea of a modern Islamic South Asian nation. “ But”, he says, “I can’t write about these things myself because I don’t live here and I don’t suffer here. I don’t mean by that that only the physical sufferers can write — I know that Tolstoy suffered a spiritual pain through his observations of Russia.” n

Subi Shah is a

freelance TV news producer/reporter and documentary filmmaker based in London.

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ARTS & LETTERS

Bengal Lights Spring 2014 Farhad Ahmed

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Farhad Ahmed is an occasional reviewer of books and movies.

angladesh’s English-language literary journal Bengal Lights has come out with its Spring 2014 issue. The journal was conceived of as a biannual — the first issue came out in Autumn of 2012, and two issues came out subsequently in 2013. Its publisher is Kazi Anis Ahmed (under the aegis of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh) and its editor is Khademul Islam.

The Spring 2014 issue was a little late out of the gates. The proposed deadline of February — the month of the Boi Mela is an obvious target date — slipped, but all other markers of its excellent production values and content in this issue are intact, if not actually exceeded. In fact, Ahmed, widely experienced in literary matters, feels that this is the best issue yet in terms of overall quality, but especially in terms of its content.

The reasons behind his appreciation are to be found in the Editor’s Note, where Islam notes that it seemed time for a re-orientation of Bengal Lights. Or what he terms as ‘mid-course correction.’ The reason was that, though the journal’s mandate was to publish both Bangladeshi and foreign authors, ‘the balance between the two’ was hard to maintain, and the third issue may have strayed from its ‘roots.’ Thus a greater number of South Asian authors were consciously included in this issue.

The benefits to the journal, and thus to the reader, are immediate and obvious. Two of the subcontinent’s foremost poets, Adil Jussawalla and Keki Daruwalla set an enviable standard for the other poets — one of Jussawalla’s poems has been reproduced here — who include Sudeep

Sen and Shanta Acharya. A pleasant surprise in the poetry department for me is Holly Day’s ‘Cat Gut.’ In the fiction section I very much enjoyed Farrukh Dhondy’s ‘The Lamasic Code’ involving ministerial correspondence about exile and banishment, and Hasini Haputhantri’s ‘Vaddakin Vasantham’ that delicately outlines the costs of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Other notable pieces are Aiysha Jahan’s ‘The Pitch’ and the Nigerian writer Ojukwu’s ‘When Bogey Men Grow Breasts…’ There are two very strong translations of Bangladeshi authors Zakir Talukdar and Dhrubo Esh — the former by the editor himself, titled ‘On The Enemy’s Side’ about the Sarbahara Party maoist cadres turned murderers for hire. But the most compelling one is a portrait of the poet Shaheed Quadri in the translation by Kaiser Haq of two writers — Abdullah Abu Sayeed and Belal Chowdhury.

All in all, one has to agree with Anis Ahmed’s assessment — this latest offering is indeed the best yet. And one of course hopes, and knows, that under the present leadership this singular literary journal from Dhaka will continue to make giant strides in the future. n

She feels the foe within Ikthisad

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Ikhtisad is a writer and erstwhile lawyer. He can be reached via Twitter on @ikhtisad.

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he Liberation War is covered extensively at the Ekushey Boi Mela every year. Bangladeshis seem to be of the opinion that it is the only subject-matter that allows an artist to be taken seriously beyond borders. The most well-known written and filmography exports to date support this supposition. Komola Collective’s Birangona: Women of War, an hourlong, minimalistic, one-woman devised piece, treads that path, albeit from an under-represented perspective. Following performances of earlier drafts in Dhaka, the play has been on at various venues across London and other parts of the UK in late-2013 and 2014. Amongst them was the Lost Theatre in South London, where it had a two-week run in April, directed by Filiz Ozcan and designed by Caitlin Abbott.

Elements of shadow-dance, a popular and populist theatrical method of the region, were integrated into the series of monologues. The tale of Moryom, an archetypal Bengali Muslim village girl whose peasant life is torn apart by the brutality of a war, was interspersed with video clips of interviews of real birangonas.

Moryom’s family married her off, hoping that this would act as a deterrent for the invading Pakistani army. Alas, she is not spared the fate of being one of the 200,000 — the number of women who were subjected to untold horrors in rape camps, according to the play. Water and drowning motifs were weaved in intriguingly, but abruptly forgotten. The story switched between scenes where an incarcerated Moryom attempts to put the devastation into words, and ones telling of her idyllic pre-war life.

She is built as the embodiment of the unheard voices of all birangonas, living and speaking didactically of not just her life, but those of hundreds of thousands. This is ambitious, and the results are mixed. The existence of additional characters and a different form of narrative — for instance a traditional plot-driven story or adopting an informed theatrical school of

thought — may have had a more powerful impact. It would have allowed further exploration of the subject and highlighted the importance better.

There can be no doubt that the treatment these brave women received at the hands of the Pakistani military and its collaborators was deplorable.

Presenting an argument for universal condemnation of unequivocally reprehensible actions, whilst laudable, is not substantial enough.

However, the stories of suffering of the brave women whose contribution in the war effort is glossed over — thereby being lost with their deaths — deserve to be told. It is essential, if for no other reason than to prevent the malaise of misinformation from spreading. Bangladeshis, armed with knowledge that is the product of thorough research, are the only ones able to do justice to themselves by telling their stories. To this end, to be able to laugh at the offerings of Gunday and its ilk, Birangona succeeds.

The vignette, not the first item to discuss the issue of birangonas, begs the question of whether it is to be treated as the product of a study, or as a work of art. While the accounts of the survivors present unimpeachable first-hand research, if the creators attempted the former, explanations as to claims made outside of the recollections — for instance, the number of victims — need to be sought, as do clarifications about what is fact and what is fiction. In the event of the latter, the demands of historical fiction should be aimed to be met in addition to producing a piece that can be marvelled at from an artistic point of view. Such ruminations give the sense of incompleteness, of an uncertainty about what it is trying to be and setting out to do.

The video clips were the highlight of the show, which raises the question about whether theatre, as opposed to a documentary or a nonfiction book, was the best medium. Shakespeare’s histories, notably the villainous depiction of Richard III in the eponymous play that has influenced generations, show the power of the form. Wielding it requires deft execution. The raw passion of the capable actress, Leesa Gazi, who also co-wrote the script with Samina Luthfa, was proof of a person heavily invested in the piece. It did not always translate to the audience, nor did it produce an expressionistic experience. The safe play did, however, bring attention to an overlooked subject that needs to be known and discussed at home and abroad. Furthermore, it was, refreshingly, a Bangladeshi telling a story about Bangladesh on the world stage. This criminally rare occurrence should be toasted and replicated. n

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LETTER FROM LONDON Ahsan Akbar

The Wanderlust of Wes She had a strange resemblance To a cat named Frankenstein – Cat Stevens, Another Saturday Night

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merican filmmaker Wes Anderson has a thing for cats.

He also has a penchant for the music of Cat Stevens, as clearly evident in his 1998 movie Rushmore, the story of a precocious 15-year-old having a crush on his teacher. It remains my personal favourite to date from the Anderson repertoire. Though it was not a great box-office success, it has its place in the pantheon of indie comedies. Deservedly so, in my opinion. His next endeavour, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), was a blockbuster, and it went on to re-write the form of the art house-cum-commercial success. It was also the first time I got a peep at Anderson’s work — and I have been a close observer of his craft ever since.

So it was with a degree of excitement that I went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel, his latest offering and judged by the critics to be his finest to date. It is set in the imaginary Republic of Zubrowka in preWorld War II Europe, which has some resemblance to Austria. The movie with its A-list cast — no prizes for guessing — is about a hotel. However, its actual tale is about Monsieur Gustave H (played by Ralph Fiennes), the general manager of the Grand Budapest and Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori), the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted assistant and later, his only friend. We are taken on a journey quite unlike any other.

By the end of the show — and this is no spoiler — we neither get to know Gustave’s surname, nor where he came from, or the story behind his eloquence — always speaking in full sentences — adding to the charms of a man who takes his manners and grooming with utmost seriousness. As the audience revelled in a strange off-screen kinship with Gustave and Zero, the journey comes to an end, and a name appears: Stefan Zweig (1881-1942). The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson’s homage to the Viennese writer, biographer and playwright, perhaps best known for his biographies of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, et al. Zweig was a staunch anti-nationalist and a pacifist opponent of the Second World War. I caught the movie during the first weekend of its release in London.

The following week, much to my surprise, all the bookstores in town had a special section dedicated to the books of Zweig; though a celebrated writer during his time, his work has disappeared into obscurity since then. The literary sections of newspapers and magazines ran reviews of his memoir The World of Yesterday, which inspired Anderson to make the movie. Zweig had written the autobiography during his exile years in his early 1940s, shortly before committing suicide.

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In 2005 wanderlust took Wes to India to shoot The Darjeeling Limited. It was a homage to his favourite filmmaker Satyajit Ray; it was a connection that has always intrigued me. There are parallels between the two, and Ray seems to have inspired Anderson. Most recently, I found glimpses of our Feluda in Gustave, who was adventurous and at the same time, sensitive and very protective of the younger Zero. In my head, Zubrowka became the fictional land of Hirok Rajar Deshe, and I found many elements of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in Moonrise Kingdom (2012). While critics called the latter heavily leaning on Ingmar Bergman’s lighter romantic comedies, I thought Ray’s influences were coming through almost inadvertently, especially in use of the child actors. Like Ray, Anderson writes his own script, often with specific actors in mind. The latter’s hands-on approach to movie-making — using lo-fidelity techniques, his fastidious attention to detail, the camera shots/movements, down to the framing, and the pithy soundtracks — are all but reminiscent of the

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ARTS & LETTERS

Bengali master filmmaker.

One of the memorable stories of movie soundtracks is that of the one in The Darjeeling Limited. Along with Peter Sarstedt (the wistfully romantic Where Do You Go to (My Lovely)) and The Kinks, it is actually dominated by scores from Ray films — from Charulata to Jalshaghar. Anderson’s music team travelled across India (they were on location in Jodhpur, Rajasthan) to Calcutta to look for the scores only to find they did not exist on CD. They had to approach the Satyajit Ray estate and foundation to convince them of digitising all the master tapes, which involved a lot of back-and-forth negotiations. Perhaps somebody should have warned them that it was not an easy process where Bengalis were concerned!

Anyway, Anderson cites the soundtrack as having some of the most unique music he has ever featured on any of his films, and it was all worth it in the end.

If Darjeeling was Anderson’s homage to Satyajit, it seems to me that the curious animation Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) was a silent nod to Ray Sr., even if it is an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel for children. For me, personally, the characters seemed straight out of — what is found in every Bengali household — Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray. But how much fun would it be to have a Porcuduck or a Stortle in the mix!

A duck once met a porcupine; they formed a corporation Which called itself a Porcuduck (a beastly conjugation!).

A stork to a turtle said, “Let’s put my head upon your torso; We who are so pretty now, as Stortle would be more so!”

– “Stew Much”, translated by Satyajit Ray from the original Haansh Chhilo Shojaru.

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I began by writing that Wes has a thing for cats. He does indeed. He kills them in his movies, casting domestic upheavals in a cold, unsentimental light. Dogs fare no better in the films either. Yes, this is a strange anathema compared to the rest of his creations. It’s perhaps telling of the immersive qualities of his films: In the midst of all the frivolity, we are allowed to overlook the morbid subtext. Welcome to the quirky world of Wes Anderson. n Enjoy an online peek into the wondrous works of Wes Anderson: www. rushmoreacademy.com

Wes anderson

Satyajit ray

Ahsan Akbar

is the author of The Devil’s Thumbprint (Bengal Lights Books, 2013), a collection of poems.

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The discussion on ‘Global Literature’ keeps moving forward through different lenses. A&L brings to you two noteworthy speeches related to this topic, a keynote speech by Aamer Hossain from the Islamabad Literature Festival, April 2014 and Maya Jaggi’s opening speech from the Bengal Lights Literary Conclave in Dhaka, May 2014.

Uprooted: The Art of Dislocation Aamer Hossain

Friends, fellow writers and fellow readers:

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Aamer Hussein writes short fiction, novellas, literary criticism, and essays, and translates from Urdu and Italian.

Hussein was born and brought up in Karachi, but spent his early teens at high school in the mountains of South India before moving to London, aged 15.

All three countries he has lived in have influenced his fiction.

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am delighted to be back in Islamabad after an absence of exactly a year. I congratulate the organisers on bringing together so many writers, thinkers and artists from Pakistan and Bangladesh, India, Britain and elsewhere. This year, I have the added pleasure of bringing to you a new book of stories, published here in Pakistan for the first time. I remember how, when I first began to write more than a quarter of a century ago, I longed to reach Pakistani readers, and when I finally managed to publish my third book, Cactus Town, here in 2002, I felt as if it was my first. There were only a few us then who were Pakistan-born and writing in English, but today many more writers from this country have gained national and international acclaim and placed Pakistani writings on the map of world literature.

But a younger generation has begun to write in troubled times, without the tranquil spaces some of us had known.

Beginning with the calamities of 2001, the projection of our literature on the international screen has coincided with devastating wars, the rise of extremisms of many sorts in our own regions, and of virulent xenophobia in some sections of society in the western world. Because technology and new forms of reading have given today’s writers far more visibility than those of past generations, they have had to carry the burden of representing their group or their country, in a way their predecessors perhaps never did.

I speak not only of writers from South Asia but from Syria and Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, Bosnia, Egypt and many other places. Loss of mother tongue, displacement and alienation is a familiar story to many of us today. And in such times I often find myself asking, as the French poet Ronsard did in an earlier age, “In the midst of war, in a century without faith, and among a thousand troubles, is it not great folly to write about love?”

I was talking to a young friend born in Palestine and brought up in America, who writes from her sense of rupture and fragmentation: Living between countries, languages and loyalties. In response to her words, lines from a story I once read by Elisabeth Mann Borgese come to mind: “Uprooted. Kicked around in worlds and creeds and systems.

All of us.”

Elisabeth Mann Borgese was German, the legendary Thomas Mann’s daughter, and was, you might think, addressing a western dilemma: But no, the character who utters this epigrammatic statement is a colonial, an Englishman brought up in India.

And when I think of Borgese’s words, several books by colonials come to mind, English, French or Dutch: The literature of nostalgia and of subtly transformed identities. We can mention Kipling and Godden, Camus and Duras, for their fictions of unbelonging , unreachable homes and epiphanies of return.

The epiphany of return is wonderfully summed up by a sight of British shores in Forster’s classic, A Passage to India. Fielding, its central character, who criticised an Indian poet for writing about nightingales and roses, is enraptured by the daffodils of England’s green and pleasant

land. Today, however, the post-colonial writer is reversing the valuesystems. Home for us might be situated in whichever direction we choose to travel.

It was perhaps during colonial times that an understandable sense of dislocation was passed on by the coloniser to the colonised who had left his or her native space for another country. … Empires came and went but the sense of dislocation became the literary and metaphoric heritage of the post-colonial migrant. Words like rupture and fragmentation were the currency of our exchanges with the world. What is world literature? We ask ourselves. What designates a writer as a cosmopolitan, with or without roots? I said to my friend who writes about fragmentation, isn’t the real fragmentation in the body politic, and the rupture in our fictions the reflection of the conflict in a world that despises peaceful solutions?

For today, many of us are becoming strangers not only in the lands of our adoption but in those where our families have lived for decades or even centuries. … Just a night or so before, in London where I’ve lived for more than two decades , a historian I’ve known for many years had said to me: “You Muslims have reversed everything we fought for in the West. You’re the problem.”

What should I say about the identity he had assigned to me? I don’t hold that being a writer qualifies me as a political analyst. I join marches, sign petitions, sometimes despair and often cling to hope, but only as a layman and a common citizen. I cannot generalise about minorities or for that matter majorities. Yet I try to write from the histories that shape me and those I inhabit. I ask the questions, and look for partial answers.

What do you want from South Asia’s writers? I asked a young historian one day. “I read to discover lost histories,” he said, and I remembered how discovering the words of Aziz Ahmed and Attia Hosain had brought back worlds to me that I knew had existed but that without them would have remained mysterious and remote.

And then I think of a key moment in my own life: How, at the age of sixteen, one year after I arrived in London as a complete foreigner, I came across the work of Faiz translated by Victor Kiernan, in a bilingual edition, and learned how a poet who could write the most tender love lyrics could be deeply rooted in the history of his time and of his place. It was the doorway into modern poetry for me. By the way, it was this book that also taught me to read the Urdu script properly, and reconnected me to the mother tongue I was losing. What is more, it lead me to study Urdu and Persian classics at university along with history. In those days, when distances were greater than today and bad news travelled faster than good, the words and voices of Pakistani poets, and of the singers who sang their poems and the poets who turned them into visual images, kept me connected to my country: The voices of Faiz and Jalib, Kishwar Nahid and Fahmida Riaz and so many others. … But over the last fifteen years the ranks of Pakistani writers at home and abroad have swelled and our isolated voices have become a chorus.

We write to right wrongs in our own ways; we express our different views and we accept our differences on their terms.

I’d like to end with a few lines from one of my own favourite writers, Isak Dinesen, which reflect my feelings about why I read and why I continue to write: “Until this day, nobody has seen the trekking-birds make their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or their rivers break their course through rocks and seas to run into an ocean which is not to be found.

For god does not create a longing or a pledge without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.” n

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A New Globalism in Letters Maya Jaggi

… Just before I left London, I went to the book launch of a novel by Andrés Caicedo, a precocious yet troubled talent from Calí in Colombia.

He wrote Liveforever (1977), his masterpiece of youth and salsa music, at the age of 25, and killed himself the day it was published — never knowing that he would become only the second Colombian author to appear in the famous soft covers of Penguin Modern Classics, following Gabriel García Márquez. In London, his sister spoke movingly of how her brother, growing up in a former Spanish colony with a cultural cringe towards Paris, would somehow get his hands on English books — Dickens, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf. He did this, she said with a light in her eyes, “out of love and curiosity for la literatura — literature.”

It was a strangely liberating moment. Ever since I began my career as a literary critic and cultural journalist in Britain 25 years ago, I have felt an insidious pressure to define and delineate what I do — partly because, when I began, it was so unusual. My instinct, from the beginning, was to widen what struck me as a narrow angle of vision, and authority, on the world’s literature. But over the years people have, on occasion, tried to box me in, mistaking my interests as ‘Commonwealth,’ ‘postcolonial’ or, worse still, ‘black-and-Asian,’ because among the writers I have interviewed are Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Anita Desai, Ben Okri, Vikram Seth, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, and many other known and less well-known names. Or was my thing ‘literature in translation,’ because I have also interviewed Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, WG Sebald, Mario Vargas Llosa, Kenzaburo Oë, Orhan Pamuk, Mahmoud Darwish, Gao Xingjian?

So, what is my field? I write on literature and speak to writers from all over the globe, whatever their citizenship or address; whether they stay at ‘home’ or leave, or have many homes; whether they write in English or their work comes to me via the art of translation.

Is this ‘world literature’ — or is that like ‘world music,’ leaving out most British and US artists? I’ve also interviewed Ian McEwan, Jeannette Winterson, Barbara Kingsolver … Is it ‘global literature’? Or ‘international literature’? In that moment, listening to Caicedo’s sister, I realised that the obligation to define or qualify rests with those who pretend to be serious about this art while ignoring so much of it, whether through a British or American or transatlantic bias; or a European one; or by favouring only those who write in English; or those who live or are published in a few Western cities — often just London and New York. I cover literature, I should say. What is it that you do?

I start from that determinedly naive position because we are here partly to debate these terms. Is ‘world literature’ writing that has been anointed as universal in metropolitan centres of power, and disseminated from those centres? Is ‘global literature’ writing flowing the other way? Is there such a thing as a ‘global novel,’ and has ‘global fiction’ become a certain kind of writing that finds favour with Western publishers and readers, to the exclusion of other kinds? Is there a ‘new globalism’?

Things have certainly changed since I began my career, when not a single African, Arab or Chinese writer had yet won the Nobel prize in literature — though India and Japan did slightly better, with Rabindranath Tagore, of course, and Yasunari Kawabata. Many more major literary prizes in the English-speaking world now admit translations — including the Man Asian Literary Prize in Hong Kong (whose jury I chaired last year); the International Impac Dublin Literary Award (whose jury I am part of this year); the Man Booker International; and the forerunner of them all, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for which Chowringhee (1962) by Mani Sankar Mukherjee was shortlisted in 2010. … If some writing is more easily ‘globalised,’ as some critics have argued, are other kinds more stubbornly national, indigestible, less likely to be widely assimilated or understood? I have never forgotten a review I once read that dismissed the Algerian writer in French, Assia Djebar, as ‘culturally impenetrable.’ There is a power relation in that

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judgement. The less powerful have always had to make the effort to understand the culture of those who dominate them, to survive. Only the omnipotent have the luxury of baffled incomprehension. But it is interesting to watch how, as the Chinese and Indian book markets have risen in strength, multinational publishers have set up shop in Beijing and New Delhi — to sell, but also to scout and to buy.

Things have also moved on from the quizzical responses I heard to Rushdie’s book The Jaguar Smile (1987): “Why is an Indian writing about Nicaragua?” Or rather, “Why do we want to read an Indian writing about Nicaragua?” Why ever not? There is, I think, greater recognition that not all roads lead to Rome; that Amitav Ghosh may write about his encounter with Egypt, as he did in In an Antique Land (1994); Rana Dasgupta may write a novel with an elderly Bulgarian protagonist, as in Solo (2009); or Andrés Neuman, an Argentinian living in Spain, may write of forbidden love in a fictitious, 19th-century provincial Germany, as in Traveller of the Century (2009). If writers refuse to stay in the boxes others have built for them, they also decline to gloss their writing with explanatory vocabularies or anthropological footnotes. … But has the time come to rise above national labels for writers and declare them ‘free-floating’? No one is outside history. Yet new maps may be called for. Junot Díaz was bracketed as a ‘Latino’ author in the US, with his Spanglish-inflected novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). But in his own words to me: “African diasporic, migrant, Caribbean, Dominican, Jersey boy — these are my building blocks. It’s more an interlocking chain than any one point.” I place Díaz among an emerging group of truly American writers (including Francisco Goldman, Dany Laferrière, Edwidge Danticat and Bobby Antoni) whose work encompasses the hemisphere, drawing lines of literary affinity with American writers across languages.

There is a new literature emerging around Gulf labour, too. Goat Days (2008) by Benyamin, written in Malayalam in Bahrain, published in English translation by Penguin India, and longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2013, is novel of hallucinatory power. Its hero is a diver from Kerala enslaved as a goat herd in the Saudi desert who is treated worse than the animals he tends. Or Saud Alsanousi’s The Bamboo Stalk (2011), which won last year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction, in which the son of a Kuwaiti journalist and his Filipina housemaid hits a wall of prejudice in his country of birth — the author’s Kuwait. … Publishers all over the world would do well to study these new maps, and I believe they will. As long as there are publishers, they will need powerful, original stories, and the best editors and agents will seek them out. When Chowringhee was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the author was asked why the English translation took more than 40 years to come out. “I suppose it was my middle-class Bengali arrogance,” he replied. “Why should I take my work to the world?

The world should come to me.” He has a point.

Thank you.

n

© Maya Jaggi

Maya Jaggi is an award-winning cultural journalist and critic in London who has been an arts profile writer for the Guardian Review since 2000, and writes for publications including Financial Times and Newsweek. She has been a judge of many literary prizes, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2012 by the Open University in Britain for her outstanding contribution to education and culture, especially in ‘extending the map of international writing.’

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Serialized Story

Samira - Part 12

Shingara, Chanachur and a Handful of Lies Shazia Omar

Samira so far: Leaving behind the land of freedom along with a boyfriend, Samira Murshid flies to Dhaka to be with her ill father and aging mother. In her new job Samira’s boss Shahab Sattar was just found dead floating in Buriganga.

With a murder in the office will Samira blend into the reality that Dhaka forcefully offers?

T

Shazia Omar is the author of two books, Like a Diamond in the Sky and Intentional Smile, a play, Karma Coffee, and numerous short stories and articles.

She is a founding member of Writers Block Bangladesh.

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he office had turned into a playground for every curious cop in the tri-state area. Three truck loads of them, dressed in their daily blues, with batons and sweat stains, were lined up outside the building throwing deadly glares at passing rickshawallahs. About another dozen had wandered inside along with several RAB officers, a handful of journalists and some TV cameramen. Samira made her way past one particularly skinny cop at the doorway, wondering what he could possibly do to protect the people of Bangladesh, when he himself looked like a malnourished Somalian.

She had heard the news about Shahab’s murder at 11 in the morning and things had not been the same since. All staff had been given the day off but some still made it in, including Sikandar and Rumi. They sat together sipping sugary tea, sharing bits of news they had heard.

“It was the opposition party,” said Rumi, dipping a piece of toast biscuit into his tea. “Shahab was outspoken. He wrote op-eds about the antielection campaigns in the North. His uncle, his apon chacha, is an MP in the haors.”

“Na, dosto, it was his wife,” said Sikandar. “She caught him with that Brazilian fashion designer. The one who works for TKM Garments. I saw the way she glared at her at our Christmas party. I was staring too, the Brazilian bombshell has a skull tattoo on her neck. But, you know what they say: All is fair in love and war! Pass me the biscuits, Rumi?”

Samira was sipping her tea slowly, trying to think. She had only once seen Shahab looking unsettled. She had asked him what was wrong. He had said something cryptic, something about the fine line between right and wrong.

“I heard he killed a man some twenty years ago in his Dhaka University days, before fleeing to America. These things come back to haunt you.”

It was the secretary from the creative department. She had sauntered in with a packet of chanachur. Her eyes were swollen from crying.

“He went to Columbia!” argued Rumi. “Not Dhaka University.”

“That was for his Masters,” corrected Sikandar.

Samira excused herself from the rumour mill and wandered towards Shahab’s office. Twenty men were inside searching for fingerprints and what-not so she veered off and made her way to her desk instead. The stories didn’t seem to tally up. Certainly Shahab was sharp, shrewd and sarcastic, but he was not the type to get involved in messy, underground activities, or so Samira had thought. Truth is, you can never guess about a person’s secret life, and every person has one. Samira thought briefly of her own dark lies, hidden in her past, and decided she would not let the fly-by rumours shade her opinion of Shahab. As far as she was concerned, he was a good boss, with intelligence and a creative spark.

She turned on her desktop and was waiting for the password prompt when she noticed a suited man, broad built and black, a bit like Denzel Washington, sitting in the desk behind her. “Hello?” she said, swivelling her chair.

The man looked up, startled. “Oh, good morning,” he replied. “Sorry, is this your real estate? I thought staff had the day off.”

Samira smiled. He was American, she knew from his accent. “No, you’re ok there. This is my desk. That’s my friend Sonia’s desk, but it looks like she’s not coming in today.”

“Ok, so I can stick around then?”

“Sure ... Hi, I’m Samira. And you?”

“Uh … I’m Paxton.”

Samira sensed his hesitation and that made her more curious. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh … well, I guess you’ve heard, about the CEO?” he replied.

“It’s tragic, isn’t it?” She couldn’t help but think of Brian. It was the man’s American accent, she guessed.

“Murder is always tragic, though I didn’t know the man myself. Was he a good guy?” asked Paxton. His eyes were deep pools of compassion.

“He was good to work with,” said Samira, suddenly a wave of nostalgia washed over her. She recalled Shahab’s face when they won a new pitch, the way his eyes twinkled, the way he always passed all credit off to the team. “But I’m new here. I just moved, from America.”

“Oh yeah? Whereabouts?”

“Manhattan,” she said.

“I’ve been there a few times,” replied Paxton. “Back in the 80s. It used be a … ” Sikandar strolled over. He eyed the stranger inconspicuously. “Am I interrupting something?” he asked.

“Sikandar, this is Paxton,” introduced Samira.

Paxton reached out to shake hands but Sikandar pretended not to notice. “The shingaras have arrived,” he said to Samira, as though she was waiting for the news.

“I already had breakfast,” replied Samira, a bit annoyed.

“Oh. Ok.” He walked off.

“Trouble zone?” asked Samira, returning to her earlier conversation.

“Sex, drugs, rock n roll,” said Paxton. “And gang wars.”

“And what were you doing there?” asked Samira.

“I was investigating.”

“Are you a detective?” asked Samira.

“No,” replied Paxton sharply. “I’m a … reporter.”

A second man approached them and stood stiff before Paxton. “Sir!” he said. “The fax has arrived.”

Fax? Who uses fax anymore, wondered Samira. “ A h , alright, let’s go. It was a pleasure meeting you, Samira.

Perhaps I’ll see you around?”

“Sure, see you later.” Samira watched as they departed. She wondered what sort of paper he wrote for. She decided she had better check on Sikandar, who had acted quite oddly a bit earlier.

“Why are you flirting with CIA?” said Sikandar as she entered the room.

“CIA? He said he’s a reporter,” replied Samira.

“Reporter? With bulging muscles and a pistol in his holster?” said Sikandar.

“Pistol?” Samira admonished herself for not noticing. Or was Sikandar making it up? Nothing seemed truthful today. She reached for a shingara, not wanting to talk too much. She stared out the window and saw that soft drizzles were falling upon the glass. A timid knock at the open door caught her attention. It was an attractive lady in a white sari, sad eyes, ghomta over her head.

“Hello?” said Rumi.

“Hello, can you show me to Shahab’s office please?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

Samira jumped out of her seat, eager to get out of the room. “This way,” she said, leading the woman. “I’m Samira. And you?”

“I’m Tasneem. Shahab’s wife.” She chewed her lips and her eyes traveled a million miles away. n

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