Arts & Letters Vol 2 Issue 9

D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, S E P T E M B E R 7, 2 0 1 4 D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, S E P T E M B E R 7, 2 0 1 4

ARTS & LETTERS

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn” is said to be a six-word novel, there is a myth that Erenst Hemmingway was the author of this six. Storytelling doesn’t always follow definite forms. Even though we are most used to the traditional structures of stories, we also see, read, hear stories told using different techniques. In this issue of Arts and Letters, we are taking a page and playing with the idea of experimental storytelling and flash fictions with just six words. Our writers contributed six-word memoirs. Hope our sixes will inspire you to write a few of sixes of your own.

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

But that wasn’t human flesh, surely?

Central park, vows taken, then broken.

Driven by nostalgia, rebels resumed fight.

I said, dinner? He said, Paris.

- Kazi Anis Ahmed

- Sharbari Zohra Ahmed

If only I knew that then

We won our freedom, history says

- Zeeshan Khan

Thinking about thoughts are thoughts themselves

- Shakil Ahmed Once procrastination subsides, fame awaits arrival

- M. K Aaref

Do not straighten your curly hair

- Nusrat Matin Eat well, lose weight through decomposition A femme fatale with irresistible espièglerie

- Kaiser Kabir

Performing to an Audiance, camera missing

- Iffat Nawaz Skinny dipping? ok let’s try it!

- Shazia Omar

Nostalgia: wet dreams, most satisfying sex.

- E. M. Savage.

You’re reading page 1 of 1094

- Anika Mariam Ahmed

I held this space for awhile It was funny until it rained

We parted to let love grow

- Saad Z Hossain

- Nisha Ali I need my password to life.

I told her I will wait.

Silence fills what words cannot.

Long distance relationship with my guitar

- Maria May

-Tahjib Shamsuddin

I don’t sleep, I just dream

-Namira Hossain

Some dreams are better left undreamt

- Morpheus of the Endless

Heart sputters. Surgery. Forever on pills

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I screw up therefore I love

Kierkegaard, Fear. Trembling. Angst rises within

- Rafi Islam

- S M Shahrukh

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D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, S E P T E M B E R 7, 2 0 1 4

Sun Catcher Alisha Ebling

I

believe the man sitting across from me wants to see me naked.

I should say, rather, I know this is the case. Allow me to equivocate.

I mean explain.

I mean. I don’t know what I mean.

I am a female. He is a male.

(For some, this will explain all that needs to be explained.)

I should add in here that this alone is not the reason I know this man wants to see me without the clothes that I had only a few hours before so delicately, strategically planned.

Without the tan dress I chose for exactly the reason of receiving this reaction. Without the shoes that are causing a sore of sorts along the inside toe-side. Without the necklace.

Without the earrings.

Or actually, with the necklace and the earrings.

I am not telling you this to be self-serving. This isn’t flattery. I am not wishing this man to want to see me naked. But I know he does.

I know this because he told me.

Before he said the words, I had been feeling sleepy, syrupy, like the feeling caused from several hours of drinking white wine in the sun.

I wanted conversation to flow better. It was all stunted and— Impeded and— I was verging on drunk and really just making it all so difficult. Me being a woman and all. This being our first date and all.

It’s not that I care if he sees me naked.

I don’t care if he sees the mark of discoloration next to my belly button.

Or notices the thinness of my un-toned arms.

Or the hair on my upper thighs that hadn’t been carefully trimmed in preparation for this date.

Like a woman should have.

No. I don’t want him to see me naked because then he’ll be able to see all my vulnerable insides.

He’ll see that I drink too much.

And that I smoke when I’m stressed.

And that for the last ten (10!!!) years I’ve let too many boys purporting to be men in.

-- to my bed.

-- to my life. -- to my ; And he’ll see that I’m never really sure what I’m doing. And that I don’t really believe in any god. And that I have a father who cares more about other women than his only daughter. And that my mother died too young. I mean I was too young. I mean I was too young to care. And that I don’t know how to act in public. And that I still don’t know how to cook. And that I want to name my child something unpronounceable but I’d like to skip the pregnancy, labor pains, and the ages from seven to thirteen.

And that sometimes I like to be barefoot and write poetry in the rain and that I’ve been trying to play the guitar for seven (7!!!) years and that I like the pleasure without the pain I mean I like the pain without the pleasure I mean I mean I don’t know what I mean.

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I once dated a guy who wanted to have sex with me and I didn’t. I was fifteen and he’s dead now, anyway.

But I digress.

This man, this boy, he owned a sun catcher.

It was the most beautiful thing in his parents’ old wooden house.

It was, effectively, the reason I stayed.

The colors were just so beautiful.

I won’t describe them for you here.

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Because I’m telling you it was indescribable.

Who wants to read a description of colors anyway.

Another thing about this boy. When we inevitably broke up (for a million different adolescent reasons, like that he wore the same shirt for three weeks and that he couldn’t remember my birth date) he called me one night. I think it was a night in April. And it was raining, because it’s always fucking raining in April, and he said, “It’s not even November and you got me standing in the rain.” He actually said that. He was actually crying when he said it.

But back to the sun catcher.

One night we were smoking cigarettes and watching a movie. I don’t remember which movie, but it was an action movie, there was a white guy and a black guy sidekick and anyway I wasn’t into it.

There was some piss-warm beer being drunk. This guy, my guy, fell asleep. And when he did I stole that sun catcher.

Just took it.

I went outside, lit another cigarette, and held it up to the sky.

To catch the moonlight, you see.

But the colors were dulled, not bright at all. Kind of bland. Bleak. So I put it in my back pocket, and I left.

I’m not trying to be metaphorical. It was just a sun catcher. Take it as you will.

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The man across from me is talking. He mentioned something just now about me being a woman and something I should like because I’m a woman. Trying to be relatable, I suppose. He thinks I’m listening because I’m nodding when appropriate.

Occasionally laughing.

It’s just that I’m bored.

It’s not his fault that I’m bored.

I’m bored because I was thinking of Truths.

Like, the Truth that we are having dinner. We are on a first date but we are at a third date restaurant, eating third date food. And I know he wants me to do what it is women are supposed to do on a third date.

That is, to leave with him.

So that he can see me naked.

But I’ll remind you again this was only the first date.

And the Truth that this guy assumes I’m younger than I am.

And then there’s the other Truth.

The Truth that this guy and I will go on a second date.

And a third.

And by the fourth we’ll be boyfriend and girlfriend.

And we’ll stay together, and I’ll spend the three to four years before we get married hoping to break up with him at some yet undetermined date in the future. And we’ll have kids, or we won’t, and he’ll have an affair, or he won’t, and I’ll become sullen.

Let me be honest here. I really just want to talk. And try to be a woman.

For whatever that means. Which should be easier, I’d think. It should be, by this point. But here I am. Still using boys to explain myself. n

Alisha Ebling is a writer living in Philadelphia. She seeks to show the many aspects of femininity through her work. She’s currently writing a novel.

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Pope of the Pop! Rubana Huq

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ollowing the Spring of 1975, when the Rolling Stones chose Andy’s estate in the quiet Montauk at a $5000 rent and began rehearsing for the album to be: Black and Blue, Andy ended up designing the logo of the Rolling Stones. That deepened Andy Warhol’s relationship with Mick Jagger and this is exactly how Andy often grew his bondages.

I am sharing with you a picture from my personal collection, which Andy Warhol took of the legendary Mick Jagger and Ashmet Ertgun, president of Atlantic Records. This picture was taken during his tenure at Euthen, his famous estate at Montauk Moorlands, in between 1979 and 1986. What was Andy doing in Montauk?

Rubana Huq is an Entrepreneur and aspiring academic.

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In Montauk, Andy Warhol was photographing his social whirls. That was a place where Andy Warhol was never without his Polaroid camera or his 35mm negatives. Nearly all of his work was based in photography and when he died, he left behind a ton of photographs capturing his iconic guests at leisure. Whether taken in a photo booth, or with a Polaroid, Warhol never edited or re-printed his photographs.The photographs in black-and-white 8x10s shot on various points cover Warhol’s pace in 70s and 80s.

Warhol, the illustrator, band manager, filmmaker, producer and even an editor, ruled the phase of Postmoderism that stretched between 19301987. In this period, Andy Warhol was best promoter of pop art, was at his best as a filmmaker in ‘Chelsea Girls’ (1966), best with the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings in 1962 and also the highest paid artist when he sold a 1963 painting “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)”at US$105 million.

The neo-Duchampain Warhol challenged Abstract art that opposed social reality. For him, creativity was oversimplified. For him fame in the future was a possibility that would last for famous 15 minutes.

His stance was one which made art contagious.

Warhol’s evenings at the clubs, his social networking and his studio, the “factory” defined him. For Andy, who believed in making money, work and business being an art, the world of art and illustration was an amalgamation of artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement.

His straightforwardness in mechanical reproduction of images through photographic silk-screening on to canvas is what brought him fame. By using ready imagery from advertising, products, magazines and by repeating image on canvas by applying unnatural colors Warhol struck a gold mine. In spite of the prints being erroneous and being faint, dark, and even crooked, he magnified what he created. He is one who created hype in the mainstream culture. At a time when art was for the elite and the intellectual, Andy Warhol broke the boundaries and turned art into a product affordable and replicable.

In theory and practice, Andy Warhol flaunted in-between-ness between screen-printing and painting, original and copy, handmade and reproduced, abstraction and representation and of course, between high and low culture. Bringing abstraction to contemporary art market was what Warhol preached and practised. Bridging between different taste cultures in a society where different groups could also invest in

images and rise beyond the modernist’s elitist sense of expertise was what he ended up achieving. Warhol strived for multiple access points and infinite interpretive response. By promoting plural coding, Warhol indicated that art depended on who saw it and what mental tools were used to read it. Warhol played with boundaries in the multiple cultural spaces that he had created and promoted.

Andy Warhol’s art had a clear position, which was both critical and collusive. The urinal of Duchamp, bottle rack or comb that dada-ism stood was followed by the post-Dadaist Warhol. While Dada parodied the uselessness of modern art, pushing art off its pedestal, the border tension or the fringe interference provoked by Warhol appealed to a wider audience, which dealt with art-pop culture and art-commodities.

Warhol’s art included multiple forms of media, from hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, to music. And lastly, a few years before his death he used the Amiga computers to produce art generated by computers. Most of his work was done at his studio, better known as “The Factory.”

This was a place where he collaborated with assistants like Gerard Malanga who assisted Warhol with the production of silkscreens, films, sculpture at the foiland- paint lined “Factory,” which hosted intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemians, celebrities, and the wealthy.

For Warhol, America was a country where the rich and poor both drank Coca-Cola. For Warhol, being commissioned meant only spending 23 minutes painting a whole BMW car. For Warhol, pop comments were best represented by his Rorschach inkblot. And of course, for the “Pope of the pop” Hollywood offered his most favorite: the plastic. Stardom attracted him, and fame enticed him. Yet the appeal of the popular mass pushed him to gravitate towards the ordinary, which was usable and replicable. For Andy Warhol, all lived in and within Art and Art was at its best in the mass spaces. Exclusivity and elitism in art was taboo.

After many years of silkscreen, oxidation, photography, Warhol collaborated and painted 50 canvases with a brush between 1984 and 1986. His last work completed in January 1987, was a series of paintings commissioned by Credito Valtalinese Gallery, which stands opposite the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, the building where Leonardo da Vinci painted his fresco, The Last Supper. The famous scene of Jesus

surrounded by his disciples is repeated twice one over the other, and this duplication overlaid with yellow color was what attracted over 3000 visitors. Four weeks later Warhol was dead.

Yet, as for today, Andy Warhol doesn’t still seem to be dead. For someone who died twenty-seven years ago, he seems strangely alive. It was only yesterday that I found a Warholian Obama in the net. And of course with the print screens of Marilyn Monroe in the 60s, the Campbell soup tins, the cola bottles, prints of John Lennon, and even Mao Zedong in our mugs, t-shirts, posters et al. Andy Warhol is still alive and rockin’! n

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Punchy opening lines James Saville chooses four of his favourites People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”

—True Grit, Charles Portis (1968) Simply yet powerfully does Charles Portis presents the premise of his darkly comic revenge fantasy with a few simple yet powerful lines.

The opening is a reflection of the narrator’s character: No nonsense.

Set in America’s old west shortly after the civil war, the novel documents the imperturbable Mattie Ross’s journey to bring her father’s killers to justice. Mattie proves to be determined hunter who lacks compassion for anyone who gets in her way, bending them to her will by the sheer force of her personality – all with dour humourlessness and unrelenting piety.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” —Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955) What does this evoke? In a word: Obsession. Every syllable is dripping with sexual desire; there’s something completely obscene about the description of the tongue moving as he utters her name. Added to this, the alliteration and trite cadence gives the impression of a sinister nursery rhyme – entirely appropriate for a novel about a peadophillic relationship. The narrator Humbert Humbert is a literature professor who has seduced, or rather been seduced by, the twelve-year-old Dolores Hayes whom he gives the nickname “Lolita.”

“Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.”

—Crash, J. G. Ballard (1973) The genius of this sentence is how effectively disconcerting it is (“Eh? ‘last’ car crash! How many car crashes did he have?”). The plot of this

book is as strange as they come, Dr. Robert Vaughn, is a man with a bizarre sexual fetish for car accidents, and who dreams of death in a head on collision with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. It is said the first person to read the manuscript at the publisher was minded to attach the following note: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!”

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at fivethirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.”

—Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1981)

Dramatic, grim and rather surreal. The rest of the novel is the same: Marquez takes the traditional detective story structure and turns it inside out. The sequence of events is non-linear: We know he’s going to die, we soon know why he’s going to die and who’s going to kill him but the precise details we can only learn from the witness statements, and so we have to jump back and forward in time as we hear each person’s account of the fateful 48 hours preceding Santiago’s death – all the while knowing, and fearing, what awaits him. n

James Saville is a freelance journalist and Weekend Tribune contributor. He read philosophy at London University and has a passion for tall tales.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS BANGLA-ENGLISH LITERARY TRANSLATION WORKSHOP 15-20 NOVEMBER 2014 Dhaka Translation Centre (DTC), in partnership with the British Centre for Literary Translation, Commonwealth Writers and English Pen, is delighted to announce a call for applications for a workshop on Bangla-English translation, to be held in Dhaka from 15-20 November 2014.

Led by the award-winning literary translator Arunava Sinha, workshop participants will work on a consensus translation of one particular text – a short story or an excerpt from a novel – with the author present. The workshop will offer a space for collaboration and peer learning, where participants will be able to share ideas and, with the text before them, discuss in real-time the challenges of translating from Bangla to English. After the workshop, participants will be assigned stories to translate for an anthology of fiction of Bangladesh.

HOW TO APPLY Interested candidates are asked to fill in an online form available at the website listed below. Deadline for applications is 30th September 2014 and successful applicants will be informed by 15th October 2014. www.ulab.edu.bd/dtc/beltw2014 VENUE AND FEES The workshop will be held on the campus of the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh (ULAB) in Dhanmondi, Dhaka. A fee of BDT 2,000 will be collected to cover administrative expenses. For further details and contact information, please visit the website listed above.

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WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR: • Early to mid-career literary translators working in Bangla-English translation.

• Bilingual creative writers interested in exploring literary translation as a way to expand their writing practice • Participants must be over 18 and citizens of Bangladesh living and working in Bangladesh.

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Dhaka Diaries Nirvair Singh

E

very city is just as much a living, breathing organism as the people and dreams that inhabit it. It is a tangible thing, not just a concept or a collection of buildings and roads.

When I first arrived in Dhaka, I missed home very much, and continued to do so for a long time. It is only when I allowed myself to be assimilated by Bangladeshi culture that I started seeing the city and its many emotions as an insider.

Alienation is a phenomenon that is directly related to migration.

However, there are many other layers to it—it occurs on different levels.

Someone born and brought up in a particular city may, at times, find it

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just as alien as a migrant worker. My sense of being displaced made me sensitive to the alienation that people feel, regardless of the place they belong to. It made me understand that alienation is also a state of mind not so far removed from loneliness.

A busy place, too, has its moments of quietude and melancholia. The writer Orhan Pamuk has spoken about it while describing Istanbul.

He called it the ‘‘huzun of a city—”a state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating.” He says that huzun is not something experienced by only one individual, but is the mood shared by millions.

Dhaka’s moods are also closely linked to political turmoil. Hartals

or strikes empty the otherwise bustling city. There are days when people walk shoulder to shoulder, and there is barely any breathing space, and then there are days when the city seems dead. It is an unnatural calm—almost as if everyone is waiting for the violence of Molotov cocktails, hockey sticks and sloganeering to empty its fury. This unease, this malaise also characterises the people. They are happy, but also furtively looking over their shoulders, fearing what awaits them at the next turn.

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Most of these observations occurred to me after I finished shooting. They lurked somewhere in my subconscious, and were just mere scraps rather than finished thoughts. However, they influenced my eyes, my mind and hence, my hand. And so, I came to make these somewhat dark portraits of Dhaka’s huzun.

Nirvair Singh Rai hails from Bathinda, Punjab, India. He grew up watching his father pursue making pictures with a film camera. And gradually, photography became his partner in moments of solitude.

He went on to intern with World Press Photo awardwinning photographer, Pablo Bartholomew, who further honed his ways of seeing.

More than being a body of work, these images are visual records, diary entries of my time here, the places I’ve seen, the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had. In some way, these images are also a record of my relationship with the city, which cannot be contained within words. Sometimes, it is simply about way the rain falls, sometimes, it is about seeing a striking face, sometimes it is about the warmth that reminds me of home. Dhaka is many mothers to many children. But what it is to me, for me, is something I am still exploring and uncovering. n

A correction note for A&L Eid issue: : Shabnam Nadiya’s piece on Sunil Gangopadhyay from Arts and Letters Eid Issue was originally published on the International Writing Program’s Shambaugh House blog http://iwp.uiowa.edu/shse/2012-10-29/sunil-gangopadhyay-1934-2012-the-artist-returns-0

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Serialized Story

Samira - Part 14 Secrets Srabonti Narmeen Ali 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. Not only the Dhaka police but the CIA is also involved in the search for the murderer. Shahab left a letter for Samira’s father, half understood half unknown.

S

amira looked everywhere for the letter. She went through every part of the house it seemed, but it was nowhere to be found. She was half convinced that her father had thrown it away.

Srabonti Narmeen Ali is the author of the novel, Hope in Technicolor as well as various short stories and articles. She is also a journalist by profession and a singer.

It was a hot and muggy Friday, and the overpowering stench of sweat oozed uninvitingly through every crack of the house. Even the ACs seemed to sputter fearfully and fade ineffectually into the background.

The fans, turned on in haste to aid their younger and hipper cousins of heat management, creaked in despair, not being able to take the weight of the uncompromising heat. Everything was an effort. Even breathing was difficult. Moving was an impossibility, almost. But Samira had been frantically moving all over the house, turning everything upside down, looking for the letter that her father had flatly refused to finish reading out loud.

What had Shadab said? Who was Taimur Mullik Khan? Samira had seen a few notes from Shadab’s secretary on his desk the day she heard about his death. All of them had said in big letters, “TMK CALLED. ASKED YOU TO CALL ASAP.” The notes were all dated from the day before he died.

Samira wondered if TMK was the same man that Shadab mentioned in his letter. Her father’s face had become ghostly pale when he read the name out loud. His throat seemed to constrict. He had smacked his lips and sipped a tall glass of cool water and folded the letter into four parts and deftly put it into the front pocket of his white linen shirt, so old that it was frayed at the edges. He had kept his hand over the pocket, and Samira had fleetingly wondered whether he was holding his hand over his heart. She had memorized the shirt and had seen it in the laundry basket in her parents’ bathroom. The next day, as she was frantically going through her parents’ bedroom and praying that the servants hadn’t taken the shirt away to be washed, she had checked its front pocket, but found it empty. Although she had followed him around all day, her father had managed, in the five minute bathroom break she had taken in the evening after almost four hours of waiting and following, to put the letter away somewhere.

Samira’s head hurt. She had been crying all day. Her first bout of hysterics had come when her parents announced with as much gusto as they could pull off under the circumstances, that they were all invited to a family picnic in Savar, a tradition that became a monthly ritual once the majority of the family had moved to Dhaka; and after the realization that managing to get the entire family to Chittagong once a month was an impossibility. She had told her parents that she wasn’t going. And her mother started to get teary-eyed, while her father asked her sternly why not. When she said she wasn’t feeling well, her mother began sniffing loudly and her father looked annoyed and said she looked fine. She insisted that she had a headache, which she was getting because of the heat. Her father looked away and said the fresh air in Savar would do her a world of good. She retorted by saying that there was no such thing as fresh air in Savar or anywhere else in Bangladesh and he turned on her with angry bulging eyes, looking nothing like her beloved father.

He grabbed her arm, not enough to hurt, but enough to make her gasp in surprise, and said she had to come because this was her family.

Her mother, who was usually the disciplinarian and the hard-ass was

reduced to a ball of sobs and wet, clumsy tears, while her father, usually the softie, was becoming a semi-monster. He looked angry. He looked determined. He looked like he was going to force her and the words were out before Samira could stop them.

“They’re not my family. I’m not going.”

Shock and indignation caused her father to let go of her arm and her mother’s sobs amplified to an unbearable wailing. Samira didn’t think twice. She quickly ran into her room and closed the door, turning the lock. Her father was still standing there, hand outstretched, bug-eyed, fingers frozen in a gesture that looked slightly obscene. She didn’t know how long they waited for her to come out and say sorry. She didn’t care.

She put on her iPod and listened to music that made her feel even more isolated from the world. She cried, sitting on her bed, angrily brushing away her tears, her cheeks becoming raw from the salty tears. For every tear that she wiped she felt angrier and more red-hot tears came streaming down in their place. And after an hour when she unlocked the door and peeked outside, the apartment was empty. She was alone. They had left her.

Perversely, the first thought she had was that she should call Sikander.

She wanted to piss off her parents by inviting him into her house. Perhaps she would even have sex with him. But then, the thought of his body odor overrode her impulse to piss her parents off and she refrained. He disgusted her and fascinated her at the same time. She wanted to know what he would think of all of this. Shadab’s death, his connection to her father, the mysterious TMK and of course, the discovery of her birth. Her parents had still not brought it up with her and for a while she thought she was going to be able to move on and not let it affect her.

But s o m e t h i ng in her father’s eyes when he grabbed her made the realization that he wasn’t her real father solidify like cement in her heart.

And she had lashed out.

Since then she had not been able to shake the horrible feeling that her parents had betrayed her by lying to her all these years. Even worse, they had shared her private secret with everyone else in the family, except her. They had played games with her life, they had entrusted the wrong people – people like Reenie, who had no business knowing. And she had held it over Samira’s head for years.

Shaking her head to free herself of these thoughts she began to busy herself by looking for the letter. She checked her father’s room, his bathroom, his study, every place that he could possibly hide the letter.

Nothing.

She wandered into the kitchen, biting her lips. The servants had all disappeared and a tin of biscuits suddenly caught her eye. Digestive biscuits. Her father’s favorite. For as long as she could remember, he had kept his biscuits inside a ceramic n

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